By Laura Reid, CHRP

You have been provided with detailed medical information on an employee and then learn from the employee’s manager that their performance has dropped substantially. Do you divulge the details or not?

An employee you know is going to be fired bounces into your office to tell you about the perfect new house he is about to sign off on tomorrow. What do you say?

An employee has come to you with an accusation of a manager berating another employee in a meeting at which the CEO was present. You approach the CEO for verification and are told to, “drop it.” What do you do?

More often than not, the toughest questions that arise in the day-to-day practice of HR are the ethical ones for which the answers were never taught in school. When reviewing employee and employer interests and commitments by each, there are often conflicting ideas; even polarizing the two as being separate can give rise to conflict.

Indeed, set betwixt between employer and employee expectations, the ethics of HR professionals add another layer of complexity to achieving the fine balance required.

Ethics: By The Book and at Work
The dictionary version of ethics is expansive: a system of moral principles; the rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions of a particular group, culture; and moral principles, as of an individual; and that branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions.

In the workplace, we might consider ethics through a slightly different set of lenses:

• The employers’s version of ethics;
• The employees’ version of ethics;
• HR’s version of ethics; and
• The legal acts that apply to the issue at hand.

As such, within any organization that holds a high standard of value around its people, HR will find ethics in play everyday.

Confidence in Confidentiality
As an HR professional, one must factor in all of the differing expectations within an organization, to develop the clarity required to both define and walk the thin line with confidence and confidentiality.
There are times when that requires true HR leadership. After all, it takes a leader to be recognized by one—and to stand one’s ground when needed.

If employees feel that HR is simply a message relay for the C-suite, developing the trust required to sustain a positive workplace culture becomes unlikely, if not impossible. If employees believe HR is there only for the employer, HR’s potential is exponentially diminished.

Having a position of trust in an organization, and particularly in human resources, means employees feel that they can share with you in confidence. Fortunately, confidentiality is written into the Canadian Council of Human Resources Associations’ Code of Ethics, whereby HR professionals:

Hold in strict confidence all confidential information acquired in the course of the performance of one’s duties, and not divulge confidential information unless required by law and/or where serious harm is imminent.

Leading with Leadership
Standing by this aspect of the HR Code of Ethics can be challenging and create tension with the the CEO, owner or senior manager who has have the expectation that HR divulge or discuss any and all confidential information.

The HR professional who agrees to such full disclosure must in turn disclose this fact to any employee ‘before’ they provide confidential information regarding with whom that information may be shared.
If an employee begins with “I have to tell you this and you cannot tell anyone else,” you need to immediately clarify the boundaries. For example, if it is an issue of harassment, an investigation is required whether the employee wants one or not. This is not to discourage, but to protect the employee.

Taking a Stand for the Greater Good
Senior leaders may take hardline positions or zero tolerance approaches and land themselves in a situation that is costly for the organization on multiple levels ranging from court awards to a crushed workplace culture.

Some years ago, I was told by a senior leader that his assistant of eight years had “become stupid” and required immediate termination due to an error made. Knowing her performance to have been exemplary, I took a stand with the best tools at HR’s disposal—questions.

When did she become stupid? How did you draw that conclusion? What exactly did she do? When did it happen? How exactly did that occur? What were your instructions? What exactly did you say and ‘how’ did you say it?

We went back and forth and it gave him a chance to be heard and to hear himself. I listened too. Then I simply stated, “This is an important issue for you to bring it to me, and I like to be professional and thorough and do excellent work for you and for the individual involved. I don’t she has done anything deserving to be fired.”

She was not fired and they were working well together within the week.

Always Asking Questions
Picking a fight with leadership is not the point of making a stand. Holding employers and employees alike accountable to the same processes where ethics are concerned can go a long way to building a strong company culture—as well as defining HR’s role as a cultural catalyst.

“I really require the factual information of exactly what took place and the details including the time, event, issue, people, or who was involved, what happened, when did it happen, how did it happen, and why do you think it happened.”

This simple process of drawing factual information from someone who has already drawn a conclusion can be extremely useful when treading ethical grounds.

Further in-depth analysis and questioning must always be done if only to assure the parties involved, be it your CEO or most recent hire, that they are being heard and acknowledged.

Finding the Fine Balance
In order to maintain that core trust, HR professionals need to communicate with absolute clarity to an employee: what will be discussed at what stage and with whom.

There are times when the ethical issue facing HR may require an external party to guide and assist in navigating a fact-finding process often fraught with conflicting emotions and as many biases as parties involved.  To be able to provide objective analysis while separating our own emotions and personal biases can be challenging. This universal truth is further exacerbated for HR professionals dealing with the emotions and biases of every person in the workplace.

Having the ability to fact find while understanding the personalities and biases involved and maintaining an objective perspective and employee trust ‘can’ be done; countless HR professionals do it daily.

Alternatively, those in HR who maintain that they work for the firm or the CEO alone, are not only missing the point, but likely contending with every higher rates of turnover and disengagement.

Ethical issues are inevitable. How we approach them as HR professionals is what defines the path we walk, as well as our success at the art of resolution.

Laura Reid, CHRP of Laura Reid & Associates Ltd is a mediator, negotiator and ethics expert in in legal human resources situations. 

(PeopleTalk Summer 2015)