Behind the Book: The Ethical Workplace

The rules we learned in 2016, and the ones we learned in 2020, are evolving faster than the platforms we use to discuss them.

The core of it hasn’t moved. Honesty is still honesty whether you’re telling the truth to somebody’s face or through a cartoon avatar in a video call. Respect is still respect regardless of the medium carrying it.

Companies usually teach workplace ethics as a compliance video, and I think that’s why so little of it sticks. Most people don’t need a slideshow about bribery. They need help with the quiet moments, like the credit somebody else took or the boss who wants a number massaged, and those moments multiplied once the office moved into everybody’s kitchen. What changed is the terrain. Some of the old landmarks are still standing, treat people decently, be honest, do good work, and the ground around them looks nothing like it did.

We’re all improvising, in roughly the position of early internet users working out email etiquette. People used to write in capitals because nobody had told them it read as shouting. That’s the phase we’re in with a great deal of modern professional conduct. This book won’t hand anybody a perfect blueprint, because nobody has one.

Why does distance make ethics matter more?

Because when nobody can see you, the only thing holding the arrangement together is trust. Technology made work more complicated and at the same time made conduct more essential. You can now work from anywhere with anyone on the planet, and every part of that depends on people doing what they promised when nobody is checking. That’s a lot of weight to hang on character, and I don’t think most companies have noticed.

When a manager can’t physically observe what you’re doing, integrity stops being a virtue and becomes a currency. It’s the thing being traded on, whether or not anybody names it.

That’s the argument for the book existing now. The same principles carry considerably more weight in a distributed workplace than they did in a building.

What does workplace ethics mean?

Making good choices when nobody is forcing you to.

It’s the voice that says perhaps I shouldn’t take credit for this idea, or perhaps I should mention that the client said no before I talked them into yes. It doesn’t always point at the easiest route and it usually keeps you from driving off a cliff.

And when you ignore it, it keeps nagging until you correct course. That’s the practical reason to listen to it early instead of late. I think that nagging voice is badly underrated. People treat it as an obstacle to getting ahead, when it’s usually the cheapest early warning they’ll ever get.

The everyday version of the same idea is simpler. Ethics is the difference between being the person everybody wants to work with and the person everybody avoids in the break room.

Why is there a chapter on when DEI becomes unethical?

Because a book on workplace ethics that only examines one direction isn’t examining anything.

There’s a chapter on diversity, equity and inclusion and a separate one on where those initiatives go wrong. The second is explicitly not an argument against the principles, which the book treats as sound. It’s an argument that good intentions produce bad outcomes when implementation fails or when the pursuit of one kind of fairness creates another kind of unfairness. Overcorrection is the failure mode it describes. An organization swinging so far toward inclusion that it produces new exclusion.

Handling both halves is the only defensible way to write that material. A book that praised the principles and never examined the practice would be advocacy, and one that attacked the practice while ignoring the principles would be something else.

What do you do about an unethical boss?

Something other than what HR will tell you.

The problem is the power imbalance. A difficult colleague can be avoided or worked around. A boss controls your assignments, your evaluations, your advancement and possibly your employment, and that changes what’s available to you.

Which is why the standard advice about having a conversation is close to useless in this situation. It assumes two parties who can both walk away from the exchange, and only one of them can. The have-a-conversation advice is dangerous, because it sounds kind and it gets people hurt. The advice to calmly raise concerns with the person who signs your reviews ignores who holds the power, and the employee is the one who pays for that advice.

The book offers one piece of reassurance. You aren’t imagining it. The disorientation of working for somebody whose conduct doesn’t make sense is a normal response to an abnormal situation, and there’s a separate chapter for when the problem isn’t the boss but the company.

What do you do when the company itself is the problem?

That’s a different situation from a bad boss and it gets its own chapter. The book’s image for it is being a passenger on the Titanic after you’ve spotted the iceberg and before anybody else believes you. You can see the problem clearly, you know where it’s heading, and you’re on a ship committed to its course.

Systemic corruption runs deeper than individual bad actors or isolated incidents. When the behavior is built into the culture, the business model, or standard operating procedure, you’re dealing with an institution operating as designed.

So the question narrows to three. Whether you try to save the ship, save yourself, or warn others before impact. Those are three different decisions with different costs and the chapter treats them that way instead of recommending one.

How do you handle a difficult colleague?

By first working out whether the behavior crosses a line. Every workplace has one. The colleague who takes credit for other people’s ideas, the manager who has a tantrum when something doesn’t go their way, the person who produces drama wherever they’re standing.

The chapter is careful to separate that from ordinary friction, like somebody who chews loudly or schedules too many meetings. Its subject is conduct that undermines people or produces a toxic environment, and confusing the two categories is how a reasonable person acquires a reputation for being difficult themselves.

The question was never whether you’ll encounter it. You will, and probably more than once. The question is what you do with it when it arrives.

What has happened to work-life balance?

It stopped being balance, and the replacement word is doing some work it didn’t earn. Balance once meant leaving at five and not thinking about work until nine the following morning. It now means holding on to some version of a personal identity while the kitchen table is a conference room and the bedroom wall is a video background.

The phrase has become quaint because technology removed the boundaries instead of people negotiating them away. What replaced it is integration. That sounds better and mostly means work has spread into every corner of the available space and most of the available hours.

I dislike the word. It’s a corporate euphemism dressed up as a lifestyle choice, and people deserve a more accurate name for what happened to their evenings.

Naming that accurately is the chapter’s contribution. A person struggling with integration is managing a different problem that’s been given a friendlier name.

What does The Ethical Workplace say about your digital footprint?

That it used to be a celebrity problem and is now everybody’s. What you post, like, share and comment on follows you across a career, and deleting something doesn’t remove it once screenshots exist. The line between personal and professional has blurred past the point where most people are tracking it.

The platforms were built for personal sharing instead of professional life and became career infrastructure anyway. Even the one that’s supposed to be the professional venue has turned into a hybrid of resume, broadcast and performance that nobody quite designed.

There’s also a chapter on what’s arriving next. Gig arrangements that don’t fit traditional employment categories, contractors working full time for a single client, and freelancers whose income depends on a platform algorithm. Those relationships carry ethical questions that didn’t exist when the frameworks were written.

Which corporate ethics failures are worth studying?

Four failures and one success, and the success is the unusual choice. Enron for executive-driven corruption. Theranos for deception by a charismatic leader. Cambridge Analytica for data ethics.

Then Wells Fargo. It’s the most instructive because it worked in the other direction. Not corruption from the top but impossible sales targets that made ethical behavior incompatible with keeping a job. Ordinary employees became participants in systematic fraud because the alternative wasn’t surviving the quarter.

I think about the Wells Fargo case more than any other. The pressure came from the targets, and it turned ordinary people into participants. I think that’s the most unjust pattern in corporate life, and it plays out in plenty of companies that never make the news.

And Microsoft, for getting it right. A company with a reputation for aggressive practice and internal competition, running a performance system that set employees against each other, which rebuilt its culture without sacrificing performance.

Most books in this category only run disasters. Including one recovery makes the argument that a different outcome is available instead of merely desirable.

What does workplace ethics ask of an ordinary employee?

Less than you might expect, and it says so in the last chapter.

After twenty chapters analyzing what everybody else is doing wrong comes the uncomfortable part: what you’re supposed to do about any of it. Not in a theoretical world where good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior punished, but in the actual one, where you have bills and a career.

The first thing it establishes is that you aren’t responsible for fixing every ethical problem you encounter. You aren’t Batman and your workplace isn’t Gotham City. Attempting to single-handedly reform a toxic culture or bring down a corrupt executive is a kind of mistake with a predictable outcome. The goal is being thoughtful about your choices, honest about the difficulties, and decent to the people you work with, whether they’re next to you or on the other side of the planet. I’m glad the book ends small. Reform fantasies make good movies and ruin real careers, and I don’t have patience for advice that sends ordinary employees on crusades. Someone who stays decent through a bad quarter and tells the truth about the numbers is doing more good than any ethics poster ever printed.

From the author

The Ethical Workplace
Nobody reissued the handbook when the rules changed. The Ethical Workplace is my survival guide for modern professionals, with five case studies.

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