Simon Says

Ethics is not a game

Remember the kid’s game Simon Says? The idea was to get the players to respond to a command, but only if the command was preceded by the phrase, “Simon Says.” If you goofed you were out. A fun game and a good way for kids to develop disciplined response skills. It is not, however, a game that belongs in business.

According to media reports it appears that Spherion, the temporary staffing company, acted within the law in denying the widow of one of their employees the benefits she –and her late husband– believed she was due. When Thomas Amschwand was dying of cancer he was naturally concerned that the life insurance benefits that he had been paying for were in order. He dotted all the “i’s” and crossed all the “t’s”. At least those he knew about.

But when his widow tried to collect the $426,000 Amschwand believed he had when he died at 30, she discovered that there was a “Simon Says” that nobody had told them about. It seems that Spherion had switched insurance companies while Amschwand was fighting cancer, and for his insurance to be valid, he had to come into the office for at least one day. Sick as he was he would certainly have met that requirement, ridiculous as it appears.

Seven years later his widow’s options were used up when the Supreme Court refused to review the lower courts who had followed the law and denied her claim. Actually there was nothing the courts could do. Spherion had every legal right to do what they did.

Reading their brief code of ethics it becomes clear that they have no understanding of the meaning of the word. It was obviously drawn up by their legal minions who are trained to look for the edge of the law. Doing the right thing never crosses their minds. So far as they are concerned anything you can get away with is OK. While that’s fine in fulfilling their responsibility to provide counsel to even the worst criminal, it has no place in the world of ethics.

It is perfectly legal but totally unconscionable to throw this kind of Simon Says requirement into the last days of a colleague. Adding insult to injury, Spherion gave back the premiums paid prior to his death. My guess is that by the time they paid their legal bills to take this case all the way up to the Supreme Court, Spherion didn’t save much.

But that isn’t all they will pay. Who would want to work for a smarmy company like that? I would lay odds that all of their best people are on the hunt for a job. The cost in productivity and efficiency for a company of their size will be in the tens of millions of dollars. What customer would want to deal with someone who might be looking for a way to rip you off within the law?

Simon Says, ethics pays off on the bottom line. Anybody should jump at that.

BullDog Reporter OPED

From time to time I submit an OPED to the Public Relations Journal, the Bull Dog Reporter . The latest was published June 24.

I Don’t Want A Seat At The Table!

Too often we communications types are the last to get involved in corporate ethics issues. Crisis management too often is a case of too little and way too late. When the wheels are falling off they call us in and expect us to make it go away. Even then we are fed bits and pieces of the mess in some vain hope that keeping us in the dark will keep the lid on the problem.

Some feel that what we need is a seat at the table. That somehow if we are in the room when the flames erupt, we will be better able to put out the fire. In truth that’s not much better than sitting in our cubical tapping out crisis plans or press releases and wondering when the fire alarm will go off.

The hell with a seat at the table. I want “the” seat at the table at the right hand of the CEO as a trusted advisor. I want to be in a position to quietly kill it when a harebrained idea pops out of somebody’s mouth. I want to be the first one the CEO calls when an issue arises. I want to be there and have a voice in the plans and policies. I don’t want the legal types making decisions on anything. If what you can get away with is to be the norm, then all the crisis management in the world won’t help.

Corporate Communications is the canary in the coalmine. We are the ones who need to be in a position to sniff out the first whiff of anything that can damage corporate reputation. Unless we are at the top of the ethics food chain helping to form the policies that guide the organization, we are not going to be able to deal with problems that occur. And in the best of companies problems occur. Sometimes circumstances that we cannot control envelop us. That happened to Jet Blue when an ice storm grounded their planes at JFK. Candor, humility, a great communications team and their reputation for doing the right thing saved them.

Sometimes an employee does something really dumb. That happened to Whole Foods when their CEO stupidly blogged under a pseudonym. Usually, it’s some less responsible individual or group of individuals. If policies and guidelines are clear it’s not hard to show these instances in their true light even when the CEO does something incredibly stupid.

Those who rely on walking the edge of the law or depend on the bottom feeding spin merchants in our discipline eventually get what they deserve. Those who rely on transparency, candor, and a dedication to doing the right thing, build the kind of trust that grows and sustains great organizations. Unfortunately some really good companies still aren’t ready to take that final step and open themselves up to all their publics, all the publics they should be relating to. That’s what Public Relations really means, relating to your publics.