Rob Chestnut on How Smart Companies Can Lead an Ethical Revolution

Michael will be talking with Rob Chesnut, author of Intentional Integrity: How Smart Companies Can Lead an Ethical Revolution, about to talk about ethics in a post-COVID workplace or integrity during times of crisis. Rob recently left his position as chief ethics officer of Airbnb but continues to consult in this area with Airbnb, eBay, Chegg, and others. Possible areas of discussion might be how integrity can guide decisions about:

• How and when to bring people back into physical workspaces. People are nervous about the transmission of the disease in closed spaces, but you need to get people back to work. Is it ethical to bring them back to work if you can’t guarantee they won’t get sick? How can you draw on integrity and values to make and build support for these decisions.
• How to handle furloughed staff – this is a group that will need some TLC. They are going to have conflicted feelings about returning to work, their key duties may have been unfulfilled leaving a backlog of work, and they may feel like they are on tenuous ground or borrowed time, making them less vocal about their needs or reporting ethical issues for fear of rocking the boat.
• Whether your ethics code worked… You’ve been through fire – it’s a great time to evaluate how your integrity and ethics codes worked for your company. Did it make decisions easier? Harder? Did it provide the guidance you needed? It may be time for an integrity reboot, but where to get started?

 How to support parents who have been juggling more than just work? How to manage remote workforces so they strive for integrity every day? What new ethical traps have come up beyond the Top 10 Rob identifies in the book? Who is responsible for ethics in a company – legal, HR, the CEO? And on.