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David Watts

The Lost Five Commandments Part 3


ETHICS ARE GOOD FOR BUSINESS

One of the most important – and most difficult – tasks for the restoration contractor is to establish a trust between the people with whom they work. Everything you say and do defines your trustworthiness. In each of the scenarios mentioned above, the potential is present to build a lifelong trust. These scenarios also present the possibility to destroy that trust as well.

Let us face it; your employees find themselves in ethically challenging situations every day.

Your technicians will have both good days and bad days. Some days they may feel that they earned an extra hour of compensation due to the way the day went. Do they reflect their time on their time cards accurately?

Your estimators work with numbers and scopes of work all day long. Are they firmly held to the task of accurately reflecting the specific needs of the project? Is their mission to find “creative” ways to inflate the costs necessary to do the work?

While a mistake from the insurance company’s payment department is somewhat rare, if an overpayment were to happen on one of your projects, would your company issue a refund or accept the over-payment in light of all those times they beat down your invoices?


Each of these scenarios present an opportunity to define the company’s ethical values.

If you are a business owner, you are likely to expect your employees to reflect similar ethical values to yours. Have you clearly communicated your company’s Code of Ethics for their daily guidance? In its absence, your employees are likely to provide a disappointing result.

However, since ethics are a morally guided decision between two “right” answers, how is a person to know what the company’s official ethical position is?

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