I WAS recently a facilitator of one of the learning sessions in an HR conference where the topic was “Instituting Civility and Ethics in the Workplace.”
One will wonder whoever thought of such topic. Ethics has been much talked in several fora. But civility? I found the term strong and odd. The workplace, in my view, is much more modern and sophisticated from its old, primitive days. Maybe urbanities could have been a more apt term?
Definition of civility and ethics
Anyway, from the start, I asked two of our distinguished panelists, Sarah McLeod of Q2 HR Solutions, Inc. and Andre Joseph Anthony Alip of the Association of Human Resource Managers (AHRM) in the Hospitality Industry, about the definition of civility and ethics. We all agreed that civility is more about manners, the basics of being mindful or sensitive to the situation of others. Ethics, on the other hand, is being able to distinguish, and act accordingly, between what is right and what is wrong?
BUSINESS
BUSINESS
BUSINESS
Let us take the case of buying a medicine from your nearby drugstore. There are drugstores that do not follow a queuing system. So one waits for his/her turn in the counter, hoping to be spotted by a mindful attendant. Suddenly out of nowhere from behind you, a customer hands in a prescription to the attendant. Expecting that his/her long reach will get the attention of the attendant, an unmindful attendant attends to him/her first; a mindful attendant tells the customer that there is another customer who is in front of him/her who came in first. Seldom can one find that the customer himself/herself will be the one to tell an attendant to serve the other customer first since that other customer came in ahead of him/her. A case of civility or lack of it. Oh yes.
I learned civility at home at an early age. Such behavior was reinforced by my Japanese superiors and colleagues who are very mindful people when I worked with a Japanese electronics company for 14-1/2 years. When one takes the escalator in Japan, you will see that the Japanese always stay on the left side of the escalator so that they do not block those who take the right side who are in a hurry to get to where they want to be. Even if I was a Vice President in this company, I photocopied my own documents. There is a practice where the user of the photocopying machine, before he/she leaves the machine, has to check first the paper tray to see if there is paper on the tray for the next user. No doubt a classic case of mindfulness.
