“Is it legal?” posed various challenges, including the blurring of could and should. The newspaper test may not (currently) travel well globally or intra-generationally. What about the friends and family test?
Would you feel comfortable telling your friends or family? It depends on what, why, and who.
You did what?
There are many shades of grey (more than 50) when it comes to ethical violations (or integrity lapses; choose your euphemism). Pilfering a few pencils for your kids is not in the same league as rape and torture while you deforest the Amazon (https://bit.ly/3QfK4In). Unless your friends and family are sociopaths, we might hope it would work in the Brazil example. What about these situations?
🚦 Your boss asks you to finish a report over a weekend (1.5x pay). You log more hours than it took you.
🚦 Your best friend from college is applying for a role. You put in a good word with your employer, explaining a vague college connection and downplaying the friendship.
🚦 Your subsidiary faces the threat of closure if you don’t hit aggressive targets. Your largest client is wavering, and you meet them for lunch. You decide to treat them lavishly to push the deal through but pay with your personal card.
🚦 Your boss is a toxic bully. They leave their workstation unattended, and you take a peek, seeing a lurid messenger exchange with another manager. You copy and paste the text into an email (on their device) and send it to HR.
🚦 Your head office has the dreaded zero tolerance for facilitation payments. You ask a few tame suppliers to overcharge and use their kickback to create a slush fund. You use the cash to pay off licensing officials who would otherwise halt your operations (incurring sizeable delay penalties).
It depends. How might your family feel about you working weekends? Would a frustrated partner encourage you to overcharge an employer who routinely invades family time? If your friend from college gets the job, might they be happy about the good word? If your client renews, which helps save your subsidiary, how many people would thank you for taking the credit card hit? Do the ends justify the means with the bully boss? Your head office has never visited your country, and their zero-tolerance policy is a subject of ridicule. Might you, your colleagues, and your family feel like you’re helping them out by keeping the payments to officials off the books & records?
The last example, I have seen repeatedly across Southeast Asia, and in each case, people are baffled when swift justice follows – they were doing you a favour!
Preliminary conclusion: Would you feel comfortable telling friends and family depends on what you did and their relationship to that act.
Why would you do that?
Motive matters. Again, the relationship between your family and friends to your (in)actions could significantly impact their response. In anti-bribery and anti-corruption, we fixate on benefit and avoiding harm. Are you violating to secure special treatment? This framework could also undermine the friends and family test.
Let’s say you work for an airline in a clerical HR role. Years pass with meagre below-inflation rises as a company backed and bankrolled by the government through every failure and affliction prospers. There are limited payroll checks about which cabin crew got on which flights. You start placing flight attendants on flights they never took and skim the payments they’d never expected (as they weren’t on the plane). Over a decade, your multi-million fraud has helped myriad friends and family – holidays, medical bills, education, and the rest.
We judge ourselves by our intentions as others assess us based on our actions. This distortion might skew your imagined response to “Would you feel comfortable telling your friends and family?” Yes, you were doing it for them. Might this rationalising be decisive in many fraud incidents intended as “victimless crimes”?
What about if your actions avoid harm to your friends and family? The insider trading scam that saves you from eviction. Or that time you let your child use your laptop for an important exam, resulting in a data compromise (as hackers target edutech).
Preliminary conclusion: A double distortion – an intention vs perception gap and the potential benefit or harm avoidance to our friends and family – could lead to wonky rationalisation.
Who cares?
Who are your friends and family? We’re going beyond the birds of a feather angle here. More, I’m interested in how they feel about what you do and whom you do it for. Are they supportive? Frustrated? Sympathetic to your plight?
I remember one of my first jobs; bar work for an events organiser. My dad asked me why my feet were soaking when I got home. The walk-in fridge in this large tent was supposed to house drinks. But a particularly indolent bar manager spent his days reading tabloids in it instead. His body temperature and a hot summer caused the fridge to leak chronically. Those working behind the bar would monitor the water levels to ensure they didn’t get too close to the electrical extension leads (a few close calls). When I explained this to my dad, how do you think he felt about my employer?
I’m not suggesting my father would have condoned or counselled retaliatory action or violating company policies. But it highlights one of the most prominent justifications for compromising our ethical standards, denying the victim. This negation might sound like, “They had it coming” or “What did they expect?”.
There are many other ways our friends and family might relate to our employer. We should not assume they will (generally) be positively inclined. They may actively support our violations as morally justifiable. For example, if we know our employer is covering up a scandal that might impact the community, might they encourage us to leak the information?
Preliminary conclusion: Don’t assume our friends and family are well-disposed towards you as an employer.
Opportunity, motive, and rationalisation
I’ve left out many more examples than I could include in such a vast topic. I’m sure you can think of dozens of instances where the views of those close to you might have conflicted with work duties. Maybe the friends and family test will force us to examine where the fraud triangle (opportunity, motive, rationalisation/pressure) meets with our external influencers.
What else might we include? I’ve heard and seen a few alternatives, including:
🔎 What advice would you give to someone you love?
🔎 What would your hero do?
🔎 Would you feel comfortable if your friends and family saw what you did?
The first has potential but will fall over when the individual’s moral conscience sets a higher bar than the organisation’s. For instance, the example about leaking a horrendous cover-up. Maybe that’s not a bad thing! I’m experimenting with this one, as we seem to give others better advice than we heed.
The second one could be fun to facilitate discussion. But on its own, there’s too much scope for fallen idols, antiheroes, and abstraction of the issue.
Finally, we’re blending the newspaper test with telling your friends and family. You don’t have to tell them; they see your actions. The benefit is that it might force us to imagine how it looks if we follow through. The drawbacks are the same as those outlined in the rest of this post.
I don’t dislike the friends and family test. It’s more relatable. But organisations and people are imperfect. It might be a fun one to use in some ethical dilemma scenarios. Get feedback (anonymously ideally) from your audience and tweak it accordingly. Let me know where you end up.
What else have you seen? What worked?