It is not very often I see ethics mentioned in the same sentence as programming, why is this? Doesn't developers and development companies care about ethics? I think they do, and here's a couple of reasons why you should consider ethics in your company if you don't do it already!
Bottom line is that I believe that
ethics pays of not only in the afterlife but also in hard steel ca$h!
I think ethics is a method to optimize your earnings and gain more personal wealth! Ethics is important
Developers today are working in an extremely stressful environment, we're constantly pushed towards the edge regarding deadlines, customer specifications and so on. Ethics is important just
"because" but it also have a couple of
logical implications that makes it easy to argue in a logical fashion that it's important for IT companies of today. And that it should get its current status upgraded. First of all it gives us a
higher goal and some
softer values that can help us understand exactly
why our colleagues together with our self must
sacrifice just another weekend being at work instead of with our family. It's much easier to understand from a moral perspective why we need to deliver
quality on time then to understand it from a
wallet perspective. Your employees will be more resistant to
change jobs if they know they're on the
good guys team today. The environment in the company will be more softened and your employees will be more
nice to each other and start
helping each other instead of competing against each other.
Teamwork is the natural bonus if you're focusing on ethics.
So how do I start
I tend to approach everything as if it was a software project. I might be wrong here and there's probably a "zillion" other ways to do this but I always attack
everything as if it was a software project. Now in a software project you would first ask your list of customers what the specifications are, what do they want and what do they expect it to solve.
Who are your customers in the ethics questions?
This can be individual but I can guarantee you that your employees should be on that list! Ask your employees what they want out of the "project". What's the current problems, what's the current status and what would they like to see improved.
"Where's your hurts and how can you fix them?" No the next level is the process or what is the shortest path to our goal. Decide upon a process according to the "needs document". Maybe there's just too much conflicts within for the company to be able to solve its own problems? Maybe you should bring in an outsider like a "corporate psychologist" or a "team builder consultant"? Maybe the biggest problems seem to be that people have too little time for private development and self realizations? Maybe you need to give them some hours a week to do their "own projects"? Maybe one day a week they should get to do
what they want instead of
what they must and that this will make your people feel as if they're able to do self-realization at work?
Then when you have the process you must
execute it! When you have executed it for a while you can come back to it and evaluate the results. Preferable here it's an advantage if you have done some measurements up front, some parameters might be hard to measure, but if you really think hard about them
everything can be measured! Now compare the difference from before you initiated the changes and afterwards and ask yourself "what have we gained"?
And here comes the really funny part... ;)
What can we expect to gain
A LOT!
Depending on your edge and/or your problems you might see one or several of these effects:
- Your employees are more resistant to job offerings from other companies. If your employees have "higher goals" when going to work they will be harder to head hunt for your competition! If your employees only work for you because of the salary pay check you're in trouble!
- Your employees will "start to care" ! You will probably notice that your employees will be more full of initiative, they will sincerely start to care (more) about their employee and they will try to find ways of contributing further to the "community"!
- Your employees are likely to experience less problems in their everyday life! This one might be harder to believe in, but an employee with a goal will be both less prune to experiencing problems in his/hers personal life in addition to that they tend to manage their problems better. "It's harder to break a mountain than a tree!"
- Your employees will probably spend less time being on sick-leave. When you have a higher goal at work you are less likely to become sick, and if you have a "minor flue" you're more likely to go to work anyway!
- You will get happier customers! This is probably the most hardest one to believe in and the most easy one to proof! When your employees are more happy and experiencing less problems at work your product quality will increase and your customers will therefore be more happy with their "personal SW vendor" and be less likely to change their favourite SW vendor for a competitor!
Now it might sound like I overdid some psycho active substances in the 60s, but this is serious science and I was born in the 70s... ;)
This is no "mumbo jumbo", x-files or "new age" philosophy! This is hard facts! It's easy to backtrack and log the effect. And in the end you are likely to experience that ethics is literally
worth its weight in gold and that you can actually
earn money on raising the bars on ethics!
Now to summarize:
"Ethics pays in the afterlife AND in the bank account!" ;)
I hope this article was as amusing and informative to read as it was to write, and if you have comments about this feel free to leave them here!
The 5th step If you want to read more about ethics in the professional life I can recommend
"The 5th step" by Dag Andersen (ISBN:9788230003190) which is a book trying to define the "laws of emotions" among other things. For a small excerpt from the book, check up
this link (you must scroll down a bit before you see the "laws of emotionality")