How HR Consultant should Manage Ethical Issues and Ensure Compliance?

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How HR Consultant should Manage
Ethical Issues and Ensure Compliance?
Organizations function according to some norms
and values as well as have characteristic
organizational culture that is the product of the
above elements. Compliance with ethical norms is
an integral aspect of every employees work and
organizations strive to ensure that policies are
being followed, no norms are being violated, and
above all, employees stick to the rules and
regulations governing their employment. Indeed,
given the proliferation of business scandals
arising from unethical conduct and unacceptable
behaviour, organizations are even more keen to
ensure that such instances of bad behaviour that
have the potential to destroy their reputations,
as well as cause monetary losses, and also lead
to punitive actions by the authorities do not
happen. In this context, organizations typically
entrust the Human Resource Function with
educating the employees about the ethical norms
and rules and regulations. They also task the HR
Managers with ensuring compliance, punishing
violations, enforcing the codes of conduct, as
well as keeping an eye on potential break of
rules and regulations. Thus, the HR Managers have
a pivotal role to play in the overall
organizational ecosystem as far as ethics and
values are concerned. Let us now turn to the
specific ways in which the HR Managers function
to fulfil their responsibilities and mandates.
Ethics starts from the time the potential
employees apply to the organizations as there
can be cases where aspirants fudge their
resumes as well as hide instances of past
violations in other companies. Indeed, in some
countries, there are laws and rules and
regulations which empower organizations to
report such violations not only to the management
of their companies but record them in a
centralized database accessed by all firms that
have signed up for the service so that potential
cheats can be marked and tagged which would help
the entire industry. Indeed, the pre-selection
phase is very important as given the fact that
Millions of graduates aspire to be absorbed into
the industry it is indeed the case that the
Weeding Out of Bad Apples is done as early
and as soon as possible. Even during the
selection phase, the HR consultant must be on the
lookout for possible misrepresentations of data,
wrong information pertaining to the aspirants
education or previous employment history in
addition to the gaming the system aspect which
in laymans words means aspirants collude with
each other and with insiders in the
organizations so that they are selected through
dubious means. Next, the primary task of the HR
consultant in india begins when the employees are
on-boarded, or the phase where the selection is
made and the employees join the organization and
are in the training phase. Indeed, this is the
most critical phase as far as the education of
the fresh and the new employees regarding the
organizational policies are concerned. To take
examples, the new recruits must be given the
Codes of Conduct and clearly told that any
violations, would result in termination of
employment or other punitive actions. Indeed,
some organizations have policies and rules that
specify that even minor transgressions such as
claiming inflated expenses and accepting gifts
and other favours from external parties to
provide benefits to them are not tolerated. This
is the case with many MNCs or Multinational
Corporations which take these violations very
seriously. Turning to the meat of the policies,
the most frequent violation is often linked to
the practice of violating the organizational
policies. Some instances of this can be
recording attendance for others by swiping their
identity and authentication cards in order to
mask and hide the time that the other employee
clocks in practice the practice of using
company resources for personal use when such use
is explicitly prohibited, impersonating other
employees and most importantly, using the
internet and external network access to transmit
confidential and restricted information and
data. In recent years because of the boom in
some sectors, there has been another form of
violation wherein employees approach their
colleagues with offers of jobs in other
companies, and this is a violation that is taken
very seriously in almost all firms.
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Indeed, there are several firms that routinely
dismiss the employees when such violations are
brought to their notice. In all these cases, the
HR consultant in india plays a vital role as it
is his or her job to not only monitor such
violations but also to enforce the rules and
regulations as well as punish infringements of
the rules. Apart from this, another trend that
has been noticed of late is the practice of cyber
hacking wherein employees misuse the
confidential information that is given to them as
part of normal work by sending it to external
parties, stealing passwords and other personal
information and passing them on to dubious
characters, and above all, a tendency to overuse
the internet and visit prohibited sites. Indeed,
the problem is so acute that the HR Managers
regularly monitor the browsing habits of
employees and keep a check on whether the
employees are misusing the facilities. As can be
seen from the discussion so far, there are any
number of ethical violations. and we have
covered some of them in this article in addition
to detailing how the HR consultant in india can
deal with such violations. As mentioned in the
introductory sections, with the increase in the
instances of business scandals and unethical
behaviour, it has become very important for
organizations to track violations and perhaps,
ensure that such violations do not happen in the
first place by laying down the rules and
enforcing them with an Iron hand.