Ethics 101

Oct 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Fickes

WHAT IF THE MANUFACTURER OF A WILDLY POPULAR METAL GADGET asked its security guard service to begin screening employees with metal detectors as the employees leave the factory at the end of the day?

Since the metal gadget inventory has been shrinking due to internal theft, the client wants to know which employees have been carrying the profits out the door.

Suppose the security officer who handles the screening has been working his post for five years, and over that time, he has made a number of close friends. Suppose later that day, the officer overheard a couple of employees talking about the large number of people going home after work with metal gadgets concealed in their clothing.

The security officer worries that a couple of his friends might be snared in the surprise screening. What does he do? Does he warn his friends that the company will be screening employees at the exits, or does he remain silent and risk letting his friends be swept up in the investigation?

Informing a friend of the impending search would in most cases seem to violate an ethical standard by giving special treatment to friends. Yet the temptation to protect a friend who may possibly have run afoul of the law would be enormous.

Are security officers equipped intellectually and emotionally to recognize and reason through such ethical problems? Have they been taught to sort out competing issues of personal and professional loyalty? Has their training enabled them to reason through these questions and reach logical and ethical conclusions?

These are difficult questions for anyone. Chances are, however, that many if not most security guard companies do not provide their officers with the training necessary to recognize and deal with the serious ethical problems that might arise on the job.

What if a security guard company fails to give its officers the tools necessary to evaluate ethical issues? Would not that failure qualify as an ethical lapse?

Wackenhut ethics

“We always consider ethics — in hiring, training, and in managing officers,” says Dr. Michael Goodboe, vice president of human resources and corporate learning with Wackenhut Corp., Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. “Ethical concerns relate to hiring the right people as security officers. We do comprehensive background checks before hiring anyone, to verify credit history, criminal history and other things that play into the subject of ethics.”

Just because someone passes a background check, however, does not mean that he or she will prove particularly ethical on the job, so Wackenhut stresses ethics in training programs for new security officers. In fact, the story recounted above about employees stealing metal gadgets was adapted from the Wackenhut course for new security officers.

According to Wackenhut training materials, security officers should, upon completing the ethics program of study, be able to define ethics, describe the relationship between ethical behavior and law, describe the connection between ethics and perception, list five core ethical values, explain the relationship between ethics and human rights, describe what is meant by the loss prevention concept, list three items from the Wackenhut security professional's code of ethics, cite two questions one can ask oneself to test the ethics in a decision and explain why supervisors have special responsibilities regarding ethics above those who report to them.

Most people would be hard pressed to meet two or three of those requirements let alone all of them without several hours, if not days, of study. But that's just Ethics 101 in the Wackenhut curriculum.

Supervisors at Wackenhut must take an 80-hour program on personnel management entitled “The Leadership Course.” One of the chapters in the course is called “Ethical Conduct.” It covers topics such as ethics and decision-making, personal ethics, interaction between personal and organizational ethics, promoting ethical conduct within the organization and leadership ethics.

Developing two ethics courses was no easy task. “Researching, drafting and testing the program took a good six months and cost between $4,000 and $7,000,” Goodboe says.

And do not think the program is just a sanitized corporate version of what ethics should be. Wackenhut's ethics programs, as part of larger courses, have been submitted to the University of Maryland, University College for review. “We send them all of our course materials,” Goodboe explains. “They review the materials for academic quality. If what we offer meets their standards, then the university will grant a certain number of CEUs (continuing education units) to security professionals that complete the work.”

Wackenhut's Leadership Course, which includes the chapter on Ethical Conduct, has been reviewed and qualified under this program to issue CEUs to students completing the work.

Why does Wackenhut believe the study of ethics is important? Goodboe says the company believes it should acknowledge that in the course of doing a job, security officers and supervisors will probably run into ethical conflicts and should be prepared to think about and deal with those issues.

Wackenhut training stresses the idea that ethics is more an art than a science, Goodboe continues. As such, it is a subject that should be studied in class with other people and not online, in private. “You could study ethics online,” he says. “But we prefer that ethics and several other courses, such as workplace violence and terrorism, be studied in the classroom. These are topics that you cannot study simply by following an online plan or reading a book. We believe it is important to discuss these problems in a classroom setting where students and instructors can interact personally with each other.”

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