Can we make businesses more ethical? | Elena Lopez | TEDxWarwickSalon

foreign I am Elena Lopez and I'm here today to talk to you about some of the issues I want you to consider as you enter the world the world of work I'm a business ethics consultant I work in human rights and I work in anti-bribery and anti-corruption when I was growing up in Spain I was very interested in issues of bribery and Corruption perhaps because I was seeing it on the news every day and as I studied PPE at Warwick and then went on to do my development studies Masters at Cambridge University I was increasingly interested in what people could do to prevent bribery and Corruption from happening and prevent human rights abuses from happening and I thought that in order to work in the field I would need to do so from the private from the public side sorry so I thought I would have to be drafting laws drafting policies working in government to stop bravery and Corruption from happening and from stopping human rights abuses from happening but what I learned in my Master's was that actually there is a whole private side to it a field of business ethics that I didn't know about and this is both within companies like compliance officers or human rights officers that are working within companies to look at the programs that they have to ensure they're not impacting negatively on society and The Wider business ethics field with consultants and experts that advise these companies on how to meet legislation and that is what I do today I'm a business ethics consultant and the work I do is so important because we all know what happens when things go wrong you might have seen some of these headlines or scandals you might have seen many others because we hear about scandals every day every week every month you might have heard of the Rana plaza building collabs in Bangladesh in 2013 where more than 1 100 people died and one of the biggest industrial disasters in history and this was a building that hosted five garment factories and workers were going to work forced to work even though it was clearer than the building wasn't safe you might have heard in 2020 of the scandal from boohoo where it was found out that they were supplying for suppliers in Leicester where workers were being paid as little as 3.5 pounds an hour when the minimum wage in the UK at the time was 8.72 pounds an hour so much higher this was also in the middle of the pandemic and it was also found that workers didn't have the sort of safety space between each other they didn't have PPE you might have heard in looking at sort of environmental rights you might have heard about the Volkswagen dieselgate Scandal this was when in 2015 it was found that Volkswagen cars or some of those cars were fitted with technology that meant that even though they looked compliant with EU laws about emissions in fact they were emitting up to 40 times the permitted amount of nitrogen dioxide looking at sort of bribery and Corruption issues you might have heard of the Goldman Sachs Scandal one of the biggest finds in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act legislation in the U.S they've been fine with the 2.9 billion dollar fine in connection with the bribes that they were paying to Malaysia and Abu Dhabi officials to get lucrative business and they made hundreds of millions out of this so you might have seen these sort of headlines and many others but as a business ethics consultant I can tell you that what you see on the news is only a small proportion of the injustices that occur every day in companies around the world you don't really see headlines or whole articles about some of the things I've seen you don't see articles about the pregnancy tests that women are being asked to take every month by their employer to make sure they're not pregnant so that they can't so that if they are they're fired you haven't seen the cameras that I've seen in factories that make sure that employees are monitored so they don't sit down and stop working at any point in the day you won't have heard necessarily all the issues with water scarcity in factories and plantations and Farms the scorching heat the bullying harassment and discrimination of minority groups in companies around the world the and as well for example Trade union Representatives being dismissed when they're trying to speak up about of some of these issues but I can tell you these things happen because I've seen them in my work but I can also assure you that companies are working hard every day to try to reduce both the big impacts that we've seen in the news as well as the small impacts and I can assure that because otherwise I would be out of a job so nowadays the clients that I have and the consultancy I work for have are generally big companies that have subsidiaries around the world and they want to know what's really going on in their operations it is public institutions it is global firms it is um sort of big investors that want us to look into the companies they're invested in to make sure they're not having a negative impact whether it's on labor rights on or on bribery and Corruption and what I do within my work is find Solutions find recommendations for all these clients on what they need to do so they come to us after a big Scandal because something has gone wrong and they want to make sure it doesn't happen again or when there's been a scandal in their industry so they've seen X company has had this issue they want to make sure they don't have it it is also to make sure that we help them meet legislation so the law says this that I need to have this how do I make sure I do and also to go beyond the law to do what we consider as best practice in order to do this I investigate how companies treat workers I investigate how they treat their communities and the environment and when I look at bribery and Corruption I'm doing similarly because I'm seeing it how the impact on the Public's system the government how they interact with government officials with police with judges so in order to do my work I do a lot of desktop research I do I do a lot of document review but most importantly I spend my time talking to people I speak to CEO CEOs c-suite Executives managing directors to governments I speak to ngos I speak to suppliers and communities and I speak to workers the majority of my time I spend it speaking to workers there might be in standard offices or in doing manual labor in farms plantations in factories in oil rigs all over the world and I speak to them as an independent third party Outsider of the company or the institution gathering information in a confidential way so then I can go back to the companies and give them sort of aggregate Trends I never say this person told me this but we talk about issues that I find and then importantly we talk about the recommendations that we give them and the action plan what we're trying ultimately is to make sure they don't impact on human rights and they reduce the sort of bribery and Corruption risks that they face and why do companies come to us of course we've spoken about scandals and this is something they want to avoid but another important point is that companies are made up of people like you and I and it's people that went to University and studied something that they loved and they want to then go into the world of work and do it ethically they don't want to be ashamed about the work they do and the companies they work for and so it is people that want to do the right thing and that's what I find very often with my clients other companies come to us because of the increasing legislation in both bribery and Corruption and human rights when the company I worked for started in 2000 there was very little work in business ethics companies didn't really care about these topics but over time we've seen that increasingly companies are coming to us and they care and part of it is because of legislation because we had legislation in the U.S the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that was strengthened in 1998 then we had the UK bribery act 2010 UK modern slavery act 2015 French laws on bribery and Corruption and human rights 2019-17 sorry whistleblowing directive in the EU 2019 and now this year we have more human rights due diligence laws in Europe Germany and Norwegian and Norway sorry the transparency Act and more pressure for the EU to bring legislation that will apply to all EU members which also gives more pressure to the UK to have similar legislation other companies come to us because of the consumer pressure because those scandals and just greater awareness by consumers means that actually if they don't change their practices they will have less less Revenue because people won't buy their products or their services and as I mentioned some of our clients are investors so we really see the increase of ESG investing of our environmental social and government governance investing which means that companies also care about these issues because they have to in order to bring in the investment that they need to grow and in the end it makes sense for companies to do the right thing and to work ethically because the the costs of not doing so are too high as we said there are reputational costs there are costs together in relation to the legislation like legal fines and and legal fees and prison time there is the loss of management time having to deal with the scandals um it's also harder to recruit people and so in general it also makes sense for companies increasingly as people are more aware of these issues to work ethically so most of you sitting here are either finishing University or starting this very exciting Journey some of you might work in the business ethics field like me as a business ethics consultant as a human rights officer or compliance officer within a company but most likely most of you will work in something completely different whether it's Tech Finance marketing Human Resources social media medicine research whatever it is that is not necessarily business ethics and what I want you to to take away from this talk is that even if your career is outside of business ethics strictly these issues will still impact your life and there is also something that you can do to make sure that businesses are more ethical the internal policies that govern your work will influence the culture the safety the quality that you have in your future jobs and there are certain things that you can do in your job no matter where it is whether it's in a private company or a public institution because all companies and all public institutions anyway still have policies and procedures what you can do is give feedback is to tell people like me that are drafting those policies and that are setting sort of programs and strategies about culture and the way we treat others and the way we treat our suppliers and our supply chains Etc what works and what doesn't so you really need to tell us so that we can build that in into those policies it's also very important that you speak up when you see something that is not right when you see someone being mistreated bullied harassed when you think something suspicious is going on when you're worried about an impact that you have in your com that your company has in general it's really important that you speak up in most companies now need to have a whistleblowing or speaking up system a line because this is increasingly being asked of companies with legislation and the more people that use those lines the more more people that say that something is an issue the stronger a sign it sends to companies so that they know that there is a systemic issue that they need to address and they do look at this speak up lines very carefully to address them moreover as you progress in your career you might manage a team supervise a team and managers make all the difference it's really important that as you have that role of power you set up culture of care where people can speak up they can tell you their concerns where certain behaviors are not allowed and not tolerated and It's always important how you treat people but particularly when you're in a position of power it's really important and this is something that I see all the time in my work it makes a big difference besides and beyond your working life your private life now as a student or even after while you are working it's really important and you can make a difference in the things that you do in your private life so you can learn more about the risks and about business ethics you can learn more about what companies are and aren't doing you can listen to Barbarian corruption podcasts like the global anti-corruption podcast you can listen and read different blogs on the issues there is for example a very useful page called business and human human rights Resource Center and they have fantastic articles every day on scandals on legislation on what's going on you can be critical in your social media consumption when you see ads of companies when you see people talking about companies that you should buy things from to really investigate and learn what's behind that what are the labor rights consequences of fast fashion what are sort of the bullying and harassment scandals and video gaming companies Etc and you can use social media to demand companies to be more transparent to tell your friends and family about what you found and why they shouldn't be spending money somewhere and that follows to my next point you can spend wisely you can think about where you're buying everything that you're buying from to make sure that you're not contributing to the revenue of companies that are damaging the Earth and hurting both their employees and the communities around their operations and another thing that you can do as you finish University is to research your employer you have the luxury of being in a market where employers employers want you and so you can look at the policies that they have their the reports that they have what they're disclosing to see if their culture matches your expectations and what you want in your working life and this is also something that you can bring up in the interviews the more you think about these issues and make them a part of your daily thinking the more you will think about them when you're in the Working World and the more you will be able to hold your employer accountable [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 6,016

Keywords: Business, Change, English, Ethics, Global Issues, Global issues, TEDxTalks, [TEDxEID:52054]

Id: yMm6u4hf0jw

Length: 17min 33sec (1053 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2023