“What’s the harm?”

It is easy to simply brush off a small hack, a cheat, a short cut to results and finishing work. “What’s the harm?” “Nobody got hurt.” Such excuses are often used in and out of the workplace and among large businesses. However, can one small, perhaps unethical decision lead to worse fouls?

“The Slippery Slope of Getting Away with Small Stuff”, and article by BBC on August 2014 discusses how the average worker is capable and likely to carry out large unethical actions, which often start from “small” acts. Called the “slippery-slope effect” by four professors who had written a report about the phenomenon, the effect is difficult to avoid once employees begin acting unethically. However, if businesses employ and enforce strict policies against unethical behaviour, employees would be largely discouraged to take the first step in the wrong direction. Though some actions that are unethical are still legal, the actions can have detrimental effects to other employees as well as the business, as pointed out by Burton Goldfield in an article on The Entrepreneur, “A Proactive Approach to Addressing Unethical Behavior in the Workplace”. For example, should employees continuously take credit for others’ work, employees may be discouraged from working hard, as their effort may be seen as wasted as someone else would take the credit. While some large businesses have HR managers who employees could voice their concerns to, other businesses employees may not have the same benefit. Empowering employees by giving training sessions in ethics could further help avoid the problem of unethical work practices.

While most times businesses have the simple goal to aim for high levels of profit, it is also important to manage the different stakeholders in the business. Though more businesses now realize the importance of motivation levels and work conditions for employees, some businesses may still seem reluctant to focus on the well being and priciples of their workers, especially if the correlation between employee’s well being and efficiency is not clear.