I wouldn’t like to suggest that I am the sort of person that takes great value in the words of fictional TV characters, but there is a quote I heard from Jack Bauer in the program 24 which I think is excellent.
As Jack Bauer is a bit of a legend, fictional as he may be, I am happy to share these words with you without being too ashamed. I quote:
‘You can look the other way once, and it’s no big deal, except it makes it easier for you to compromise the next time. And pretty soon that’s all you’re doing: compromising--because that’s the way you think things are done. You know those guys I busted? You think they were the bad guys? Because they weren’t, they weren’t bad guys; they were just like you and me. Except they compromised....once.’
This leads me to integrity in the workplace. You see there are two types of standards - those that people set for you and those that you set for yourself.
The standards that are set for you will be those of your professional bodies, from national guidelines, local policies and from your
manager. These standards are given to you so that the work you do is safe, efficient, and with minimal risk for you and your patients. It ensures that your work is evidence based, audited, reviewed, quality assured and amended in line with what is proven or agreed by
consensus to be better practice.
The standards you set for yourself describe your integrity. Integrity is a concept of consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations, and outcomes. Ethically integrity is regarded as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one’s actions.
It is your own integrity that will ensure that you work to the standards set for you, to honour those standards and your integrity that will ensure that those around you meet these standards too.
The Institute of Business Ethics conducted a national survey1 in 2008 to assess ethical standards and it found that compared to the previous survey in 2005:
British full-time workers are generally less tolerant of unethical practices in the workplace.
Fewer employees feel pressured to compromise ethical standards.
It also identified that in a supportive culture employees appear to be more willing to report misconduct they are aware of, and are generally more ethical in their attitudes towards a range of workplace practices.
Conversely that in an unsupportive culture, employees experience more pressure to compromise ethical standards and are more likely to feel that honesty is rarely or never practiced.
As a manager, you must set the standards and support your staff in maintaining them. You must ensure that your department abides by evidence based practice, and your system allows change, encourages improvement and supports high ethical standards.
Whether you are a manager or an employee one thing is certain. You must not compromise......not even once.
