Workers Want Trustworthiness
By Daniel Chandranayagam
Reproduced with kind permission
Being interested in the new management field of corporate social responsibility (CSR), I asked a friend recently why there appears to be more CSR consultancies opening in Singapore than Malaysia. He answered, without even thinking, “Because businesses here aren’t really interested.”
This might explain why only five participants were present at the “Integrity at Work” forum, organised by the MCA Integrity Watch Group in January.
This leads me to wonder if employers actually care about what their employees want, especially those workers whom employers really want to keep. Of course, some employers might think that giving their employees a job, especially with thousands reported to be laid off almost every week, is a benefit in itself. Yet, those good workers – the type who have the work ethic, qualifications, skill and experience any employer would want – would be the ones to know that now is the best time to jump ship.
Edelman’s South East Asia managing director, Robert Grove, said at the CSR Global Summit 2009 in Singapore that a survey found that 50% of workers would not want to work for an employer they do not trust.
Of course, basic trust means an employer has to go beyond compliance. In this sense, the 124 employers fined by the Employees’ Provident Fund for failing to submit their workers’ contributions, and the employers involved in the 147 civil cases and 1,550 criminal cases against errant employers in the last quarter of 2008, fall far below the expectations of fifty per cent of the workforce (if not more).
At the CSR forum, IBM’s Steven Davidson explained that it is better for a business to be open, rather than be pried open. Of course, this also means to be pried open by one’s own employees.
In relation to this, Grove pointed out that businesses face pressure from several groups to conduct themselves ethically, one of which is their own employees. Workers are now conducting their own due diligence on their employers and potential employers.
Websites like Glassdoor and LinkedIn make it easier for the discerning worker to find out from others just how well a business treats its workers or how ethically it conducts its business. In fact, Glassdoor allows anonymous postings from employees on their employers’ transgressions.
One can find out, for example, about how some companies use CSR to their advantage, by including “CSR” marks in an employee’s annual appraisal for their participation in the company’s CSR activities (held outside working hours). The lower the appraisal marks, the lower the annual bonus. So much for corporate social responsibility.
Having been an employee once, it is clear to me that most of the time, “integrity” and “corporate responsibility” at the workplace are rarely taken seriously by anyone but the management. And management only seem to take it seriously in front of their subordinates.
Lip service, anyone? Yet lip service and top-down mentality are hard to run away from in Malaysia. Our leaders practise this to the point where some might think there is no other way. But there is always another way. For example, IBM allows workers to use ten per cent of their working time towards causes of their choice. That is another way of doing things. Being transparent about your whole business, not only to your shareholders, but also to your employees (and customers and the public), is another way.
Telling people to trust you is different from showing people you are trustworthy. If businesses want their employees (and other stakeholders) to trust them, painful though the process might be, I can’t think of any other better way than for them to be open about everything.◊
Daniel Chandranayagam is the founder and chief editor of the CSR Digest.
