By Dennis Quick
Senior Staff Writer

In the wake of Enron, WorldCom and other corporate scandals, business ethics has become a hot issue.

This September, Trident Technical College’s Division of Continuing Education and Economic Development is adding business ethics to its curriculum through two courses.

One of the courses, “Cover Your Integrity,” is for managers and supervisors. Its purpose is to encourage company leaders to re-evaluate their company’s policies, values and mission and how well those are communicated to their employees. The course costs $149 and debuts Sept. 20.

The other course, “Ethics in Your Workplace,” is for employees and raises questions about taking unapproved short cuts to get a job done rather than doing the job correctly. The price is $99, and the course begins Oct. 18.

Both courses are 3 1⁄2 hours long and will be offered every Wednesday at Trident’s main campus in North Charleston. Class sizes will not exceed 25 participants.

The courses are interactive, requiring discussions, problem solving and reviewing case studies of ethical violations, said Steve Price, Trident Technical College educational consultant, who teaches the courses.

“The courses stress accountability and checks and balances,” Price said.

Requests for such courses came from local companies that have experienced ethical problems and from others that so far have a clean ethical slate but view the courses as a kind of preventive medicine, said Yvonne Noisette, program leader of the college’s Career, Personal and Professional Development department.

The old adage that a business’ sole purpose is to make a profit needs to be reconsidered, Noisette said.

As recent corporate scandals have illustrated, making a profit at any price can lead to ethical violations and ultimately to a company’s doom, she added.

Because many employees nowadays are burdened with larger workloads and less time to get the work done, they often choose the quick way to do the job rather than the ethical way, Noisette said.

“Reports sometimes get fudged because people doing the reports are multi-tasking and, therefore, feel pressured,” she said. “Managers have to ask: ‘Am I telling people to do it fast or do it right?’”

Doing it the right way contributes to a company’s positive standing in the public eye and helps determine the company’s legacy, Price said.

Ethical business behavior also helps retain good employees, he added.

A survey released earlier this month by LRN Corp., a Los Angeles-based company that works with corporations on ethics issues, found that 82% of a group of 834 full-time employees from across the country said they would rather work for an ethical company rather than an unethical one, even if the ethical company paid less. More than a third of those surveyed said they have left a job because they disagreed with the actions of fellow employees or managers.

Trident Technical College’s business ethics courses aim to get that and other points across with class participation in actual issues rather than by lecturing at them, Noisette emphasized.

“They won’t be learning something out of a book,” she said. “They’ll be able to apply what they learn to the workplace.”

Dennis Quick is senior staff writer at the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@charlestonbusiness.com.

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