CHAPTER 7

Fairness

Fairness is an interesting topic. Today, fairness is being downplayed compared to equity, but it is still relevant and essential.

The PRSA Code of Ethics states:

Fairness Ethics in Action

Layoffs

Fairness is questioned more often during layoffs, promotions, and hiring than anywhere else. The following examples get to the heart of the matter.

Layoffs are a fact of life in corporate America. Anthony D’Angelo, APR, Fellow PRSA, Professor at the S.I. Newhouse School at Syracuse University, discusses how to handle them ethically and fairly:

The most difficult ethical challenge I’ve encountered goes to the number of gut-wrenching reorganizations and layoffs I’ve had to announce as a director of communications in the corporate sector. I have announced no fewer than a dozen plant closings. I was the person interviewed on the evening news talking about the bad news that was going to strike a community and the residents of it.

These things are never easy. At some point, I found myself questioning my own ethical stance in terms of what was right—for the company that I was working for was actually doing very well financially.

I had personal relationships with many people who lost their jobs. I asked myself, what is right here? These people are every bit as good at their positions as I am in mine. They are losing their jobs, and I’m starting to struggle with it.

The conclusion that I came to was that I had to look at it on behalf of the long-term success and vitality of the organization to survive and thrive in a hyper-competitive environment. Sometimes that entails very, very difficult decisions. We needed to make decisions based on the long-term health of the company, and that had to do with taking responsibility for the employees that work for us, the shareholders that owned us, and the communities where we operated, so that the company could fulfill its role in society.

We also had to take a long view so that we would treat everyone in a way that went well beyond simply cutting them loose. I was very pleased the company took extraordinary measures to offer them other employment opportunities within the company, to extend severance and health benefits and to extend education benefits for retraining.

Ethics is not a transactional decision that you make once, it’s a way of life that you conduct over a marathon in the life of an organization and the life of the people who populate it.

A major portion of working through wrenching change is to answer the why questions and not just the what. Too many times, companies making these sorts of announcements simply say what is happening. We are having a 15 percent workforce reduction, here is your severance package. Thank you very much.

That is fundamentally unsatisfying to people because nature abhors a vacuum. That kind of simple presentation of the ultimate decision, treated as though it is the complete communications will usually lead to a very difficult and controversial road ahead.

Compare that to answering the why. For the company that I was working for, the why had to do with unbelievable price competition from China, long supply routes, and the lack of plant expansion ability.

In these sorts of situations, it is at least as important for our public relations professionals to bring the outside environment in. It becomes an educational venture, so the people understand the factors that we’re dealing with. Too many times, we treat it as we need to get our story out, but a free flow of information into the organization will turn the conversation in the right direction. It won’t be easy, but you have a shot at making it more effective.

It works. I remember one employee was interviewed by the media at a plant gate the very day that I announced a plant closing. The employee said, “I don’t like the decision that was made today because of the effects on me, but I understand it. I see the rationale, and understood the company had to make decisions.”

In a difficult situation, that’s about the best you can hope for.

Our chief legal counsel once told me that it is his job to tell me the legal considerations, and that all decisions carry a degree of risk. Based on that, it’s up to all of us to determine what’s our risk tolerance based on all the factors that need to go into the discussion. That was very helpful and instructive for me because here was an attorney taking a broader view of the entire organization and understanding his responsibilities.

That encouraged me to take a broader view of the entire organization and my responsibilities as a communications professional. I had to be as willing to listen as I was to talk. That goes for everybody around the table in those kinds of situations.

The key lesson is to have an ethical stance and know what you’re about. I believe wholeheartedly that your foundation has to be a Code of Ethics. It’s important to know what you stand for and know what your organization stands for so that you can ask yourself, what’s the end game here? What are we truly trying to do in the midst of a very trying time, for there will be other trying times.

It’s important that we behave in the direction of the values that we’ve said we’ve signed up for. I have found that that’s served organizations well and it also serves people well.

Mike McDougall, APR, Fellow PRSA, President of McDougall Communications, also had ethical issues with plant closings:

During my time in-house, we were going through a series of changes in the organizational structure. One of those changes meant closing a sizable manufacturing facility overseas. That’s not atypical in today’s environment, but the ethical challenge was on a few fronts.

One, we had just been to that facility a few months prior with a new CEO, talking to that employee base on how valued they were, how incredibly important they were to the organization and the future of the organization. Now, six months later, we found ourselves facing the need, because of production capacity issues, to shutter that plant. You had an ethical issue of what did we tell you. Was it the truth? Was it not? How does that square with what we’re about to do?

The second ethical issue was community-facing. Could you go in and essentially create a significant hole in the community where that facility was located? We were the fifth largest employer in a large metropolitan area in the UK. There would be consequences to that community.

The third ethical issue were some guarantees that we had made to government about labor and about staffing levels. Here’s the unique thing. By the time we would announce the plant closing, we would have met those guarantees for staffing and could essentially retain a significant amount of investment made by local and the federal government. However, would it be ethical to do so? Should we retain those funds? Technically, we had earned them, but quite honestly, three or four days outside of the window where we earned them, we’re announcing we’re shutting the plant down.

In this situation, we advised our CEO to do a couple of things. One, we need to go in and tell the truth. We need to explain that at the time, they were extremely valuable. They still are, but in weighing what the future of the organization looked like, as a whole, we needed to take this action. By not doing so, we were putting the entire organization in jeopardy. As much as this is news, we didn’t want to have to bring to them, it was incumbent that we do so.

The second thing, and he agreed to it, is he needed to deliver the messages. Do not pawn this off to somebody else to go in and clean it up. That’s the mark of a leader. He was very willing to do so. That helped us and won the respect of the other plants as well.

I remember vividly standing with him here, and outside a meeting where we were discussing what we needed to do I said, “In my view we need to go back in person. You need to go on to the plant floor and address not only one shift but all three shifts of employees. Tell them this to their face.”

He said, “That’s the right thing to do. I’m not going to like it. It’s not going to be fun, but it’s the right thing to do, so let’s make it happen.” But there are other considerations that come with that. As a multinational with some prominence, there’s some risk. We not only had him prepared from a messaging standpoint, but we prepared him from an emotional standpoint.

We did some training with him with other members of our executive team at the time. We had some of our team mimicking what we thought we’d see, truly lashing out, blaming these executives not as a company but personally for ruining their lives, creating issues where kids might not be able to return to college, questioning if they can put food on the table.

We kept our commitment to the community as well. As a communications team, we convinced the organization to hand back the investment that had been made in whole to the UK government and say we don’t need to, but this is the right thing to do. We cannot walk away from this in good faith taking your money and closing the plant.

The money involved was considerable. It was material in terms of the amount of cash that would be returned. There were certainly voices in opposition to that from purely a financial perspective, but we couched it by saying by doing this we expect to achieve a better return than we otherwise would. Ultimately, the government, on the floor of the parliament, said this is one of the best corporate closures of a site they had ever seen. Which was certainly a nice compliment. I wish it was a compliment that never had to be made, but the thought was, “You did it the right way.”

A few key pieces of advice:

1. Don’t overpromise.

2. What you do promise, make sure you can fulfill.

3. Make sure that the services you’re putting in place are not just for show. They’re actually going to help those who are affected. We asked local community leaders and the local HR teams what skills were most needed in that community? What skill sets could be transferable from the employees who would be displaced? We set up job training programs specific to the needs of that community, as opposed to just a generic job skills program that we could have put anywhere in the world.

Did it completely mitigate us leaving? Absolutely not. Did it help? Yes. You want to make sure you’re being seen as helpful as opposed to just checking the box and moving on.

One ethical point often overlooked with layoffs is balancing the ethics of communications with those employees laid off with those employees remaining to avoid a second exodus or minimize negative reaction according to Anthony D’Angelo, APR, Fellow PRSA:

Too many times, the survivors are neglected in the communications plan. Ethically, that should never happen. Part of the education process has to be with the employee base. They will certainly be disturbed by news of a facility closure or a major layoff. They need to know the way forward.

Companies need to take a look at the long term and decide what they need to have for a healthy organization. That means your customer comes second. In other words, your employees come first because the way they are treated and the way that they see fellow employees treated, including those who may be losing their jobs, will have a great deal to do with their outlook on the company and their work ethic going forward.

I can’t emphasize enough how difficult this work can be. I often ask my students: how would you feel if you had a number of friends that were working in a facility that you knew was being planned to be shuttered in six months? Do you feel okay keeping that confidential? Because you have to keep confidential, make no mistake about that.

That usually leads to a very spirited classroom discussion that goes to the idea that a public relations professional has to operate honorably and transparently. At the same time, however, we are unabashed advocates for the organizations that we counsel. One of the principles of the Code of Ethics is to safeguard the confidences of our employers.

So, we are beholden to that because we are there to advance the interests of the organization.

Elizabeth Pecsi, APR, Fellow PRSA, former Director of Executive Communications, Unisys, has also dealt with the issue from a media relations perspective.

I was working with the media when I was at a large publicly owned utility. They were making some changes in the way that it was going to run the utility.

I had quite a number of good relationships with the media, and some of them asked, “Why don’t you tell me about this? I understand that there are some changes going to be made in terms of how you’re going to be running the business.”

I realized I had to be very careful here. We were a publicly held company. This particular reporter kept poking me, saying, “Hey, you’re my buddy, can’t you give me some insight on this?” And I was like, “No, I really can’t.” It was a very awkward situation because I was friends with this person before the situation came up. But I realized that the risk and responsibility outweighed doing something for a friend.

Fairness to Employees, Clients, and Society

Part of fairness is fighting unconscious bias. We all have it, and Mickey Nall, APR, Fellow PRSA, and past Chair of PRSA, discusses how to avoid it:

We had a chief diversity officer who was challenged in the United States to come up with a training program to help recognize bias, and how to navigate through that. This training was mandatory, for all levels. No exceptions. No “I’m senior, I’m so important, I’ve got client meetings.” Training gives you the necessary tools to navigate these minefields to make the situations better.

You would sit in the room with your colleagues, and you would go, wow I’m hearing stuff out of his mouth that is totally not acceptable. They’re not meaning to be unacceptable. They just either didn’t know better or didn’t care. You can’t train people to care but you can train people that these are the guard rails that they need to stay between. That helped a great deal on the diversity side of the equation pretty quickly. What we did not do well on was inclusion and retention. We were constantly hiring great people, and yet they weren’t staying.

The key, to me, of inclusion, is it’s one thing to invite everyone to the party. We’d invited everyone to the party, look at the party, it’s so optically perfect now. But you know what? Until somebody walks across that room and invites that person to dance at the party it’s not inclusive.

We needed to take a step back. We had invited people to the party, but we weren’t asking anybody to dance. So, we formed some communities around likeness. We had a Latina community, we had an LGTBQ community, we had an African American community, we formed communities in each office so that people could support one another. And we had to put the resources behind it. We found if there is a community within the company you can go to with your issues and problems first, there will be someone in that community, stronger, more senior, more experienced, that can then go to management and say here’s an issue that we can fix.

For example, one group of creatives had a wonderful, ongoing happy hour session, where they played golf at a driving range. But several people in that group felt that it had become very cliqueish, and they didn’t like that. But nobody wanted to say anything, because they work in that department, they didn’t want to get into trouble or to be ostracized.

Once that was brought to my attention through one of the communities, I could go sit with the head of that department and say, “Here’s the issue, we either need to revamp that or I’m going to need us to do something different.” This executive was mortified. He was fighting for budget to keep doing this, and it was actually working against his team. He stopped and did something else. That increased our retention.

Being fair to employees, means dealing swiftly with high-performing, toxic employees according to Beth Monaghan, founder and CEO of Inkhouse:

Conventional wisdom is that one negative person in the office can ruin the entire office culture. That is something every leader knows. You should coach them or fire them if that’s not possible as soon as you possibly can. Where this becomes tricky is when that person is also one of your top performers. Perhaps they bring in a lot of business, perhaps you’ll lose clients. You are forced to choose between immediate financial ramifications and the people who work with that person all day long. Sometimes, that can be a very hard decision because every business has very real bottom line issues to attend to.

For me, we get rid of that person, and we’ve done it more than once. It’s always been the right decision. Always. Even in a few times where I thought, wow, this person might have a bunch of people fooled, I’ve come in the next day and the entire atmosphere in the office has shifted.

It’s hard to make those decisions but if you choose what is right for your people, the rest will follow. It’s kind of like a karma situation where you have to hope that if you do the right thing, the right thing will follow you around. I believe that to be true.

Fairness to clients is another key issue, and one unethical element too many firms do is the insidious practice of double billing. Adam Ritchie, Principal of Adam Ritchie Brand Directions, explains:

At one point in my life, I was on a team that while you were traveling for one client you were encouraged to do work for other clients and bill the same hour to two different accounts. This is the practice that I think a lot of agencies do called “value billing.” And I always thought, yeah, that’s valuable to the agency, but is it valuable to the client?

On the flip side of this, I once had a client of my own tell me that I was acting unethically because I always bill for travel time. I’m always transparent about that, and I build it into every project that requires it.

She said, “We don’t pay people while they’re sleeping on a plane.” I actually had to argue that I can’t sleep on planes, and I spend that travel time working on that account. What I wanted to say was, I’m sure when you’re sleeping on a plane, you’re getting paid for it because you get a regular paycheck from a company. And I don’t, that’s what you want to say. But you have to say the other thing.

Sometimes, writing off costs is a component of fairness according to Martin Waxman, APR:

When I decided to invest time in the P&G campaign, we had to scrap due to 9/11, I spoke to the CEO, and he was very open to it. He was all about relationships. He came from a political background, so he knew the value of long-term relationships and what you needed to do to maintain them. It’s not, “We do it, we bill you, next.” It’s not transactional.

If you are just transactional, it’s easy for a client to walk away. But if they feel their agency is not only invested but has their best interests at heart, even when it impacts the agency’s bottom line, the client starts to believe and trust you more and think, “Yeah, these people are looking out for me,” and they’ll have a conversation that maybe they don’t want to have because it’s the right thing to do.

This applies to clients as well. Early on, we fired our largest client when we only had eight clients. That was a huge decision. But our team valued that, and they became a lot more loyal because they knew that we had their backs. You just can’t put up with people being abusive to your staff; otherwise, you won’t have a staff.

Jim Olson, former Global Corporate Communications lead for Starbucks and U.S. Airways, shared insight from his time at Starbucks as they grappled with a number of ethics issues around fairness:

One of the higher-profile situations that I had to contend with was after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, where 20 children and six adults lost their lives. One of those teachers, Lauren Rousseau, was a part-time barista at Starbucks. Guns and gun violence have always been a politically and emotionally polarizing issue for the United States. This time, it was one of our own that had been directly affected by it. We as an organization, our team at Starbucks, where I was serving as the head of global corporate communications, were actually, for the first time in my life and as an organization, directly connected to this issue.

In the weeks that followed the Sandy Hook shooting, many of our stores became a battleground for the gun debate. On the one hand, you had very vocal gun violence advocates, legislation advocates, fighting for more legislation. On the other side, you had very strong, vocal Second Amendment advocates.

What we found was a very visible presence of firearms, and sometimes very large firearms, showing up in our stores. Thankfully, there was no violence associated with those, but for many of our employees and for many of our customers, it was counter to the warm and welcoming atmosphere that we tried to create. We were essentially faced with almost an impossible choice to make as an organization. We either were going to have to ban guns from our store and essentially provoke a Constitutional firestorm or continue to comply with states’ open carry laws, which is what we had been doing previously, and jeopardize that warm and welcoming family atmosphere.

We had thousands of stores across the country, spanning red states, blue states and purple states. Our employees, customers and investors were passionately on both sides of this issue. Essentially, we thought in our minds, it was going to be a no-win choice. We debated it for weeks or even a couple months. We had some very lively and passionate debates and very intellectually honest debates within our organization, all the way up to Howard Schultz, our chairman and CEO, and the board. But what makes this story a great learning lesson is that we ultimately landed on neither of those choices.

Instead, we took out full page newspaper ads and utilized our social media channels to deliver an open letter from our chairman and CEO, Howard Schultz, to the country, respectfully requesting that gun owners not bring their guns or their firearms to Starbucks stores. And it worked.

By politely requesting that our customers respect our request, not to bring their firearms to our stores, they were inclined to actually respect our request versus challenge a ban. If you draw a double yellow line, a lot of Second Amendment folks might try to challenge that ban. But by respectfully requesting that folks, when they came into our home or into our stores, respect our requests, that created a whole different atmosphere and tonality to a situation.

So, months, and even years after that decision, guns essentially vanished from Starbucks stores. Other major brands, like Target, called us wanting to understand how we addressed this issue. We joked on the corporate communications team, we could have started a consultancy around how to effectively do this. Many of them actually followed our lead.

In the beginning, it was essentially like most issues that companies face in that they view it through the lens of a binary issue. It’s a black and white decision, or it’s Option A versus Option B. We got stuck in this treadmill of debate. Then we challenged ourselves to think, is there a third way?

That’s the big lesson from this—when you think an issue is only a binary issue, and there’s only two choices or two ways out, there are more. I always now challenge myself and my teams going forward every time at any organization. When what appears to be a binary issue appears, I challenge the group to think, okay guys, we’re looking at this through these two lenses, but is there a third way? Are we thinking imaginatively enough about how we can work through this issue?

One thing we might have done differently is we should have actually started that debate and made that decision much sooner. We waited for that catalyzing event, Lauren Rousseau’s death. In hindsight, there’s no reason why we couldn’t have, as an organization, started the review of this issue sooner and made that decision sooner.

Fairness Ethics Advice

Fairness and ethics apply to society as a whole. Marcy Massura, CEO of MM & Company, believes that our private communication infrastructure may be creating an inherently unethical playing field.

I am concerned about how the private sector is acting as public infrastructure and that’s a bit of the nightmare. We have social platforms, cloud providers, and Google. They all can manipulate results to drive knowledge paths, and they can drive actions through preference.

If we can’t fix for those things, then it becomes a battle of money, and that’s the big concern here. If the bad guys have more money than you, they can win public opinion, and it’s scary. I must tell you, it’s not something that I feel is compatible without, God forbid, I can’t believe these words are coming out of my mouth, some sort of regulation. Some sort of approval on private sector infrastructures.

I am not sure what type, but I just get more uneasy with the unchecked-ness of it all. We’re relying on these little soundbites and press releases from Facebook or Google to say, “No, we’re doing it good now.” It just feels very odd. It’s a bit like going to a teacher when you’re a kid and saying, “Trust me. I did my homework. It was awesome.” But that concerns me more because that’s the source of the river of horribleness downstream. We need to start to look at the source in some way that is not handicapping the private sector, but at the same time, assuring some sort of ethical compliance or fairness.

One of the larger fairness ethical issues of our time is cancel culture. Paul Omodt, APR, Fellow PRSA, Principal of Omodt and Associates, shares his thoughts:

The piling on onto social issues ethically is something that we have to look at. There is a growing “cancel culture.” It’s very easy to go to social media and say, this person did something wrong, and therefore, they should never work ever again.

There’s an ethical component to that as a communicator. We are not allowing other people to recover or to do the things they need to do to make amends because the cancelation is so fast. I believe in the idea of people seeking forgiveness and asking for forgiveness and getting redemption when they prove that they deserve it.

But some people think that person should be canceled forever. Human beings are capable of change and capable of doing good things in their lives after they’ve done something wrong. We’ve been too fast to cancel people forever.

I may be an outlier in that, but I do see instances where good people have gone down for things, and I don’t know that it’s fair to them with a personal, not a professional transgression. I sometimes think the bullying goes a little too far. There is not an open checkbook for you to cancel a person out.

Do we allow people the chance to admit that they made a mistake, and it’s a new world out there? Maybe what we did 20 years ago or even two years ago was not the right approach, and we need a new one. But do they get canceled forever?

Silicon Valley presents some unique fairness challenges according to Bryan Scanlon, Principal of Look Left Marketing:

There’s a lot of money right now for companies, and any time that there’s money involved, ethics gets involved. You found a dollar on the street. Pick it up. What do you do with it? That basic ethical debate that is exacerbated when we are dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars.

The second macro thing is there is this incredible and very dangerous work culture that has emerged in Silicon Valley, where if you’re not always working, and always connected, and always at the next party to network, and always available 24×7, you’re somehow acting irresponsibly in the gold rush. Let’s be clear. There’s clearly a technology gold rush happening right now. And if you’re not mining every day, then you’re somehow missing out. There are people I know who basically don’t sleep, or they’re always on their phones.

I think, as a business owner—Are people getting enough time off? Are they getting enough connections? Can’t one person be in on call the old-fashioned way? There is a doctor on call, and that’s the doctor who’s just going to handle this thing if something comes up. This worries me, because people burn out quickly, and then they start making mistakes. Some of those mistakes are going to be ethical.

The third macro issue is privacy. There are enormous companies in the world who control and have an enormous amount of personal information. We are at this watershed moment of, what do you do with that information? How do you collect it? Who do you share it with? And how do you use it?

If you think about us as marketers, we’ve always thought about, what’s our traffic like? How do we get the numbers up? How do we get more leads in? We need to collect more e-mails so that I can go to sales and show them all these leads that we’ve had. It creates this arms race where the chart always has to go up to the right. That that’s a bit broken. We need to think about, well, why are we collecting this data? And what am I going to give somebody in return?

If we’re going to use that data to market, how are we giving something of value to people? There has been this great movement to inbound marketing, but it has also created this very dangerous thing where you’re just gathering e-mails, pulling in these nets of giant e-mail addresses. Quite frankly, we’ve reached the point where the oceans have gotten over fished. We’ve gathered too much of that data, and now we’re responsible for it.

I’ve seen companies do wonderful things where every three or four months, they have the guts to send a note out to say, “How are we doing? Do you want to stay on our list? Is any of this content useful to you?” And if somebody says no, they let them go. Two years ago, that was unheard of.

To fix this you have to set expectations pretty early on clients, pick good clients, and not be afraid to say, “Listen, this is just not for us. The chemistry’s not right.”

I find myself, sometimes, telling clients, “We’re just closed tomorrow. It’s a holiday. I am here if something urgent comes up. Just text me.” But it’s hard, because there’s a time element in public relations. There’s this notion of seizing the moment.

A very good photographer friend of mine has taught me that there’s always another moment. If you miss a picture, there will be another sunrise. There will be another moment where a dad picks up a child and puts him on their shoulders, and there’s this intimate moment to take a picture of. There will always be another moment. But in business, we said that that’s never the case, but there will be. I want to be clear, though, you still have to jump on those moments when you see them. You still have to be looking for them and do that.

Technology and AI create fairness issues around ethics. Brandi Boatner, IBM, shares her advice on avoiding unconscious bias:

Bias impacts pretty much everything that we do because everyone has beliefs about various things. But we can see unconscious bias in recent campaigns and ads.

A lot of companies have unconscious bias training. There has been a rash of CDOs popping up because of ethical dilemmas from unconscious bias created by a group of people who are sitting in a room coming up with a campaign and there’s nobody there to say, “I don’t know if this is the right thing that we should be doing.”

We need to have an infusion of inclusion. Say that three times real fast.

An inclusion infusion. You have to create a culture of inclusion to help with conscious awareness. Every week we are reading about a chief diversity officer being hired because this happened, there was backlash from this or from that. This continues to happen. Having an infusion of inclusion is one way to fight this. Rome wasn’t built in a day so I’m not saying it will stop overnight, but one way to change this behavior if we truly promote more inclusivity.