The belief that a corporation’s paramount duty is owed to shareholders has been the greatest obstacle to business ethics in the last 50 years.

That belief appears to be changing, at least for the CEOs of Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, IBM, and the other 200 or so American CEOs that are members of the Business Roundtable (BRT).

The BRT is finally recognizing the equal importance of employees, suppliers, the communities where we work, and of the environment in general. Going forward, when shareholder monies will have to be spent on protective equipment for employees, we won’t have to demonstrate that the cost of steel toe boots for 1,000 employees is cheaper that the cost of a hospital visit for the occasional injury. We will be able to say, simply, that we want our employees to be safe at work. Similarly, when we give our employees the day off to clean the banks of a local river, it will be because we want to give back to our host city and not because we seek some productivity gain from “happy” employees.

The BRT CEOs have spoken. They are pointing the rest of the corporate world in a new direction. It’s time we all start marching.

It’s not easy to change how we hire, compensate, promote, discipline and fire people.

Especially when we try to change quickly in an effort to improve the culture.

It’s much easier to create a new habit around a tiny part of each process and to stick to that habit. We can decide to meet with each new employee for 10 minutes and let them know that we are there for them when they face their first ethical dilemma. We can ask team members if they know of any reason why a colleague should not be promoted. We can publish weekly stories of employees doing the right thing in an effort to normalize their behavior across the company. So on, so forth.

Create a multitude to non-threatening habits, each one nudging the culture in the right direction, and watch your culture improve – seemingly without resistance.

Trust but verify.

This is the role of many governmental agencies. They provide oversight of industries that promise to make life better – with associated risks.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is one such agency. Before approving a life-saving drug, it requires pharmaceutical companies to submit data on its effectiveness and safety. Some companies, like Novartis recently, choose to hide relevant data to improve their chances of FDA approval.

I bet that some people at Novartis don’t think that the FDA is on their team. They don’t believe that both organizations are in the business of delivering safe drugs to the public. This is true of other regulated industries, where the regulator is seen as a foe, not a friend. Think of Volkswagen and the EPA.

The same dynamic is often found inside a company. We see it between the sales function and the control functions, or between the business units and the corporate headquarters. One group feels unjustly restricted by the other and tries to evade the controls. Many readers of this blog are in the E&C function and they know what I am talking about.

What is the culture at your organization? Are the control functions considered to be part of the team? If not, this should be your first priority.

Another week, another mass shooting in the US.

Two, actually.

After each incident, the local mayor proposes new ways of reducing gun violence. The state governor usually joins in. And nothing ever gets done. There has been more than 250 mass shootings in the US in 2019 so far.

What if your workplace and colleagues were the target of the next deranged shooter? Would you be ready? Do you have the right policies, training, controls and culture in place to prevent or defeat an attack?

If your organization’s code of ethics promises a safe workplace to its employees (as most codes do), you’ve obligated yourself to be ready. Don’t count on your government, at least not in the US.

When my kids were really young, they enjoyed going to religious school on the weekend.

Why would a child look forward to more schooling on the weekend? Mostly because it didn’t feel like school. Kids would learn ancient stories and wisdom by doing arts and crafts, learning songs, creating plays and making cookies. In other words, it felt like playtime.

It’s possible to do the same thing in the workplaces of adults. One such example showed up in my Givitas inbox today. One ethics officer at my organization is creating a game of multiple-choice questions to create awareness around our policies, trainings and controls. Rather than writing a bland newsletter article about a policy or sending a training-deadline reminder (threat?), she’s creating a game that will have the same educational effect with none of the corporate heaviness.

Is there room for such activities where you work?

There are questions that have been answered and acted on.

There are questions that have been answered and ignored.

There are questions that have no answer yet.

There are questions we dare not ask.

There are question we haven’t thought of asking.

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If we looked at everything we worked on yesterday or last week, what would we see? We would see that our time was spent on activities related to questions that have been answered.

All of our time spent on one category of questions.

Time to make room for other categories?

Good question.

One of my favorite movie scenes is from Apollo 13 when NASA engineers are asked to fit a square filter in a round hole, using anything available in the lunar module, but nothing more. Putting some limits or restrictions on a project can spark creativity.

On the other hand, too many restrictions can kill creativity. Eventually, the goal becomes unachievable. Employees are often placed in situations where they must perform despite too many financial, quality, safety and ethical rules. In those situations, we often see them break any of these rules except for the financial ones.

Why do they choose to meet financial goals over others? Probably because they’ve seen examples of colleagues being let go for not making the numbers, and because they have rarely seen examples of colleagues being rewarded for upholding ethical standards at the cost of losing business.

What will it take for your employees to choose to uphold ethical, quality and safety standards over financial goals?

When you first talked about the importance of culture, people looked at you funny. They didn’t understand why it mattered.

When you talk about the importance of culture now, people are uncomfortable. They don’t know what to do about it.

In five years, they’ll wish they had listened to you ten years earlier.

Look at any employee survey and the lowest-scoring category will be “communications”.

Companies respond by tasking their communications group to share what the company does. So we end up with countless articles about big wins, trade shows and #nationalinternday. And, not surprisingly, all this activity does nothing to improve the score at the next survey.

What employees really want to know is how the company does what it does (we would know that if we asked the right questions in the survey). What leadership should do is identify what employees are suspicious about and set out to explain how things really work.

Clear the air. Build trust. Provide peace of mind. And watch productivity go up.

Along with your survey score.

What are you suspicious about?