Templates for Everyday Ethical Challenges: Introducing GFOA's Smart Practices for Ethics Policies.

• Author: Kavanagh, Shayne C.

Ethics policies lay the foundation for a healthy approach to everyday and large-scale ethical challenges. The way governments write and present these policies can play a key role in determining their efficacy. Learn how GFOA has incorporated findings from psychological research to optimize the effectiveness of ethics policies--and how you can incorporate this information into your government's approach.

When we think of ethics in the finance office, our minds might jump to high-profile fraud, malfeasance, or mismanagement. The everyday ethical issues the finance office deals with, like vendor gifts or how employees record time, might seem small in comparison. These everyday issues are important, though. Consider the following:

* How these issues are handled sets the tone for ethical behavior in your local government.

* People who commit large ethical violations usually start with small ones.

* These everyday issues come up far more often than higher-profile problems. Taken together, their impact could be significant.

To help government finance offices better respond to everyday ethical concerns, GFOA developed policy templates for three areas of common concern:

* Proper recording of staff time * Vendor relations and gifts * Making gifts with public funds

The templates are available, free of charge, at gfoa.org/ethics. The policies were designed using findings from psychological research that suggested how we could optimize their effectiveness. In this article, we will review the design features of these policy templates. This will help you make the best use of the templates and assist you in developing your own policies for other topics.

Sign Up Front

It is not uncommon for ethics policies to ask people to sign the policy at the end of the document. This serves as a signal of their commitment to abide by it, and research shows that this does have benefits. One experiment showed a 20 percent reduction in cheating after people were asked to sign a form at the end, versus not signing it at all. However, asking people to sign at the beginning of the document could be more powerful because it activates people's sense of honesty and care before reading the policy. And the same experiment showed a 50 percent reduction in cheating when people were asked to sign at the beginning versus not signing at all! (1)

Everyone Is Doing It Humans are social creatures and will seek to fit in with colleagues. Often, this conformist behavior is subtle and not obvious even to the person engaging in it. For example, a person's weight is often closely correlated with that of friends and family because our eating habits are shaped by them. For example, if you all go out to dinner, you are more likely to order dessert if everyone else does, too. The power of conformity is at the root of one of the all-time great rationalizations for unethical behavior: "Everyone does it." (2) A local government ethics policy can turn the tables by putting the power of conformity to work in favor of ethical behavior. This can be done by pointing out how common ethical behavior is. (3) Our...