Keep those chili tickets out of your workplace
By Mary Kaye Ritz
Advertiser Religion & Ethics Writer
At the Nimitz Highway branch of Hilo Hattie's, a mid-sized company that sells island-style clothing and merchandise, a group of lunch buddies start planning for their Friday meals early each week.
But payroll specialist Michelle Scharsch has to wait until someone asks her where she got that heaping Hawaiian plate before she can say that for $8, her auntie not only cooks a mean lau-lau, but delivers, too.
Scharsch is not about to go against the company's ban on solicitation in the workplace, but ...
"It's hard!" commiserates co-worker Kanani Limahai, an office coordinator who has $50 worth of fund-raiser sausage in her fridge and knows company policy prevents her from selling to colleagues.
It's especially hard in Hawai'i, which Limahai called "the fund-raiser capital," not only for its ever-present Huli-Huli chicken and Zippy's chili tickets, but school benefits left and right, as well.
Still, there's a perception problem if people are allowed to solicit on the premises, said Hilo Hattie CEO Paul DeVille.
"There's a tendency to view the company as supporting it, providing the place for the solicitation," he said. "We'd rather not be perceived like that."
If the ban on solicitation is the only thing in Hilo Hattie's newly minted statement of values and employee policies that workers find hard to follow, DeVille is relieved: "That should have been Enron's problem," he said with a laugh.
In a business climate reeling from Enron's shredding and WorldCom's phony bookkeeping scandals, corporations are training employees how to be ethical just as they teach them to make a sale or balance accounts. Across the nation, companies have hired ethics officers; new New York Stock Exchange rules require all companies listed on the Big Board to have ethics codes; and just last summer, Congress enacted legislation cracking down on business fraud.
That's why at the beginning of the semester, University of Hawai'i-Manoa business professor David Bess had a panel of business-school faculty from around the island talk to students about the "very impressive kinds of standards they imposed for themselves."
"Top management, right now, is focused on making sure the organization is run, as a whole, in an ethical way," Bess said. "There will be a trickle-down effect."
The trickle-down effect can be seen at Price Busters across from the Ice Palace, where everyone from sales people Ese Umt and Floreen Kaopua to warehouse manager Leona Viernes knows not to break the Eighth Commandment, the one that's always a problem for retailers: Thou shalt not steal.
"Basically, we trust each other," Kaopua said. "We're family-close. Beth (Tom, the boss) says people are less likely to steal if they know you."
"We wouldn't even want to steal, knowing Beth the way we do," added Umt.
Kaopua, who's been with the company for four months, said Tom asks about her two children; Umt, whose tenure is a few weeks shorter than that, said she gets asked her opinion of new merchandise by Tom, who often walks the aisles and visits every store.
That's good news to Tom, the president of ERT Sales of Hawai'i Inc., better known as Price Busters, who last month was named Retailer of the Year and who believes "what goes around comes around."
When Hawaiian Electric Co. top executive Bob Clarke came to Bess' class, students heard about HEI's new set of standards, to be presented to employees Feb. 1.
As compliance officer, Peter Lewis, HEI vice president-administration and corporate secretary, is charged with enforcing the new guidelines, which build on the company's present code with some additions.
"Our primary area of focus is conflicts of interest," Lewis said, adding that his company was among the first to post its corporate governance documents on its Web site, hei.com. "What they're really trying to do is make sure that anything like WorldCom, Enron, Adelphia doesn't happen again."
State Ethics Commission Executive Director Dan Mollway also came to Bess' class, as did Lloyd M. Fujie, CPA and office managing partner of the local Deloitte & Touche branch, talking about how important it that financial statements tell the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help you Greenspan.
High standards are good business, too. As Jim Berg, Connecticut-based International Paper's director of ethics and business practice, said: "If you have a reputation for ethical behavior, that in today's marketplace is a competitive advantage."
Hawai'i's largest banks, Bank of Hawai'i and First Hawaiian, have codes of conduct that stretch back farther in time than their human resources executives can recall.
Bankoh vice chairman and director of human resources Neal Hocklander said his institution's code is revised every year. That code is pretty expansive, covering areas as overarching as regulatory compliance and as manini as not selling Girl Scout cookies on the premises without permission.
"In general, we discourage employees from selling in the workplace," Hocklander said.
But the banks' codes actually go far beyond what happens during working hours.
Both Bankoh and First Hawaiian also require that their employees handle their own private finances "responsibly," not bouncing too many checks.
"You're a representative of the company, and our business is providing financial services to the public," Hocklander said. "It's important our employees act with the same ethical standards that our customers would expect of their banker. ... We need to be above reproach."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
