Keeping a Strong Relationship with Teachers: Critical to Establishing and Sustaining a Good Ethical Culture

Romylyn A. Flores

There are potentially enormous benefits to a more permanent transition to home working, such as reduced pollution from commuting, revitalized local communities, and more flexible working arrangements. However, if a lot of people start working from home, there will be some new challenges for identifying, managing, and preventing compliance and ethics risks.

Under "normal" conditions, we rely significantly on our compliance program infrastructure— our rules and procedures, and compliance training programs— to drive and monitor compliant workplace behavior. With today's tools and technology, this infrastructure is quite simple to manage, especially for remote workers. However, infrastructure is a necessary but insufficient tool for providing compliance in practice. The most effective compliance systems are supported by ethical company cultures that transmit and preserve ethical values and practices. This transmission is dependent, in part, on our leaders, managers, and peers modeling ethical attitudes and behaviors in practice and actively displaying consistency between what we say and what we do as an organization. Remote workers, on the other hand, can be both geographically and culturally far from the ethical center of a school.

Building and keeping a strong relationship with workers is critical to establishing and sustaining a good ethical culture. For distant employees, this requires a bit more planning than depending on informal workplace contacts to transmit cultural norms. If you are currently running a compliance communications program that is mostly centered on yearly e-learning, now is a good time to examine a new strategy. Consider scheduling regular communications that keep ethics at the forefront of your thoughts. Communicate compliance messages on a regular basis. Revisiting essential ideas over time enhances memory.

Keep training modules brief: learner interest declines after six or seven minutes, so lengthier modules provide declining results. It helps individuals understand what is expected of them, why it is essential, and how to behave. The best potential consequence is that your staff want to and know how to act ethically. Compliance communications must be relevant, meaningful, and convincing to get people to act in an ethical way.

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The author is Teacher I at Dueg Resettlement Elementary School, San Clemente District, Schools Division of Tarlac Province,

Region III – Central Luzon