Do the Right Thing

Do the Right Thing

Business Ethics by Jean Gruss | Editor/Lee-Collier

Everyone is on his best behavior around the preacher on Sundays.

At HomeBanc Mortgage Corp., you might say every day is Sunday. That's because the person who leads the company's human resource department is Ike Reighard, a former Baptist minister in Atlanta.

"It quietly sets the tone," says Thomas Flood, senior vice president and area director for the Atlanta-based company's Florida operations. "Having a preacher advances our thinking around doing the right thing."

It's a tone the Uncommon Friends Foundation rewarded recently. The foundation is a Fort Myers-based nonprofit group started by local executives in 1993 to instill ethics and moral values in corporate leaders. The organization awarded HomeBanc Mortgage its first business-ethics award recently at a packed gala in Fort Myers. There were 22 applicants, and finalists included The Bonita Bay Group, Colonial Bank, Salvation Army and the Lee County chapter of the American Red Cross.

Of course, a company doesn't have to hire a preacher to have strong business ethics. HomeBanc executives say the key to running an ethical business is to hire and recruit people who "do the right thing." The company spends a lot of time and effort doing that by interviewing prospects three to four times and making them take a battery of IQ and personality tests.

Once they're hired, HomeBanc executives say employee "associates" are their first priority - even before customers, profits or market share. The idea is that happy employees will lead to happy customers, rising profits and greater market share. Too often, Flood says, companies put customers, profits or market share ahead of their own employees.

HomeBanc is generous with holidays, it has an emergency fund for employees who face tragedies and it organizes monthly and quarterly gatherings that include employee friends and families, among other perks.

In performance evaluations, employees are graded on whether they reflect the company's ethics. "It's high on importance," Flood says.

Senior executives set the example and attend training sessions to better resolve ethical issues that arise. Recently, senior managers listened to a lecture by John Maxwell, author of "The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership."

Flood says business ethics is particularly important in an industry that he says has faced ethical lapses. But that doesn't mean HomeBanc is less of a competitor. "We want to be aggressive in the marketplace, but we want to do it with integrity," he says.

At HomeBanc, doing the right thing means going beyond filling out mortgage applications accurately. "We're representing customers and their financial capability," he says. Employees must make sure customers choose a mortgage that's financially appropriate.

Business ethics at HomeBanc also involves encouraging employees to perform charity work. The company sets measurable goals; for example, it plans to build 100 homes for Habitat for Humanity and raise $1 million for cancer research. "Serving others - that gets you to this place called ethics and integrity," Flood says.

"They are very clear about what it is they stand for and how they do things," says Dawn-Marie Driscoll, a Cape Coral-based business-ethics consultant and one of the judges of the competition.

To gauge whether a company has good business ethics, Driscoll says, she imagines what would happen if the CEO disappeared. The ones who pass the test are those whose values are so ingrained that it almost doesn't matter who leads the company. "Everyone is marching to the same drummer," she says.

HOW TO INTEGRATE ETHICS

Boards of directors and top executives who don't address the subject of business ethics aggressively may want to think twice.

"I tell them it's now part of the federal-sentencing guidelines," says Dawn-Marie Driscoll, a Cape Coral-based business-ethics expert. "That gets their attention."

But Driscoll, who is an executive fellow and advisory board member of the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., says there are simple things companies can do to integrate ethics into their corporate culture.

For example, some companies such as Bonita Springs-based developer The Bonita Bay Group have formed ethics committees to tackle ethical problems that arise. The committee meets regularly and includes employees from all areas of the company. "Companies that have done this have found that it's very effective," Driscoll says.

Another idea is to train employees on how to resolve ethical dilemmas that arise in the workplace. Some Web sites provide training at a reasonable cost. Driscoll says she has created training modules for the Web site LRN.com (click on "Solutions"). "It could be part of new-employee training and a refresher course once a year," she says.

It's also a good idea to include business-ethics questions when interviewing prospective employees. For example, the interviewer could ask the prospect to describe an ethical challenge he has faced at work and how he resolved it. Or perhaps the interviewer could ask how a prospect might handle a hypothetical situation. One scenario: You and Joe attend a seminar, and Joe slips out at the beginning of the presentation and asks you to take notes. What do you do?

Bosses might also include ethics in performance reviews. "When you do performance reviews and set goals, you have to have some elements of ethics," Driscoll counsels. For example, a boss might consider whether an employee has performed his job with integrity and character and rank it from one to 10.