Virtual Ethics

 

Over years PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct has been giving guidance on practicing values as Honesty, Responsibility, Respect and Fairness in an organization specifically in project management. These values have been practiced and managed with organizations working environment where people were much more in face/face interactions. This has been globally applied across different cultures and practice of values.

Over last decades gradually, but specially with the Covid-19 Pandemic situation during 2020 has accelerated organizations to move with speed of light into a highly virtual and remote working environment. This implies the collaboration, communication, human interactions, and teamwork has moved more and more from office locations and meetings rooms to virtual rooms.

There are hundreds if not more new normal discussions on how the collaboration would or could adapt to virtuality with regards to effectiveness and productivity. The question of HR and employee’s management from people perspective related to employee’s satisfaction and wellness have also raised much more attention than earlier.

One of the key major paradigm shifts is that employees enter to an arena where the physical and mental line between professional and personal life are being merged into a grey zone. This change means among others but not limited to:

1. It requires much higher level of Emotional Intelligence to connect and maintain human interaction via virtual channels. This requires leadership to adjust to future of work with regards to emotional intelligence and values applied virtually. 
2. It requires new legislation to be reshaped adjusted to work from home or remote, and how the working rules be respected to personal life.
3. Companies need to adjust their norms for employees benefits with regards to facilities, equipment’s, and insurance questions for a fair purpose driven HR business.
4. It requires different perspective of leadership to maintain work-life or life-work balance (depends on the culture) with leaders and employees.
5. This requires companies to revisit the performance management with more objective KPIs, purpose driven analytics and added value working hours vs productivity different than earlier.

Still some obvious but complex challenges remain to look closer to with regards to ethical values as respect, fairness, responsibility, and honesty. This raises fundamental questions related to practice of these values.

As obvious there is no one easy answer to these questions that can apply to all employees and functions and culture. Some questions are related to ethics could be:

• How we manage trust between employees, team members across company? How do we avoid unethical monitoring of employees to create trust? Does this also call for being extra cognizant of the employee qualifications during hiring?
• How we manage responsibility of employers to respect personal life of employees?
• How we manage personal environment of employees with regards to respect for availability of resources they need to perform well from home or remote?
• How do we manage conflict-oriented situation and feedback giving at personal level via virtual lines of connections in a fairly manner?
• How do we make sure our assignment to employees is fair where employees might have different environment to work in. this include family situation, facilities, equipment, and tools?
• How do we put right expectation to responsibility and performance where we do not provide any same standard location and office for meeting and more?

These questions are not answered simply by training in how to run virtual calls. This is not a question of massive technology booms as MS teams, Zoom, Skype and more.

I would appreciate to hear how you experience this paradigm shift in future of work has impacted and will impact the future of work in a more and more virtual collaboration.

Thoughts?