A vast majority of CEO’s and managers mean to run ethical organizations, make money and at the same time make its customers and employees happy. But in the current corporate world, wishing for all these things at once is like wishing to eat your cake and have it at the same time. The corporate world is brutal, and sometimes they have to do unethical things to ensure the survival of their businesses and stay ahead of the competition. Greed for higher profits places employees at a tight spot, a spot where they have to choose between their careers and their values.
CEO’s and managers will make decisions that go against the company’s code of ethics, in an effort to make more money. An example would be setting impractical goals for the employees to achieve. Although it is rarely openly said, the employees at the lower levels are faced with two options when its time to execute these managerial decisions. They either meet the unrealistic expectations set by the top executives or quit and spend weeks or possibly months without a job and a source of income. The latter is not appealing to most of these employees. Most of them therefore find ways and means to achieve these goals that have been set forth by the management.
A case in point is the most recent Well’s Fargo lawsuit.
A lawsuit was filed by a lawyer of the City Of Los Angeles against Well’s Fargo for unethical treatment of its customers and employees. The financial giant was accused of setting impractical and unrealistic sales targets for its employees, and thus inducing them into unethical practices to achieve these goals.
Consequences of failing to meet these expectations were met with words like ‘oh, you’re negative’ or ‘oh, you’re not a team player’.
Hourly targets, bonuses and the fear of being fired kept employees selling.
They adopted fraudulent tactics to achieve the sky-scraping sales targets, including the opening of unauthorized and unnecessary customer accounts, issuing illegal credit cards and lines of credit as well as forging client signatures and charging fees on unwanted accounts of unaware customers.
Such is the pressure and goals set by the top executives and managers in a company that push employees to engage in unethical behaviour.
After reading this, ask yourself these questions before you go to that next interview or take up that summer internship. What will the company do for you? How will it help you grow and are its values in line with your values? Do you like the company culture? If an answer to any of these questions is NO, you might want to keep looking somewhere else.
Ref : inside-wells-fargos-high-pressure-sales-culture
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