Translate Values into Processes

Nearly every organization has a set of values designed to guide their employees’ decision making. There are three ways this can be put into practice.

1. Incentive structures
2. Resources
3. Documentation and Communication

Incentive structures

Incentive structures reward individuals for specific behaviours or achieving specific goals. Incentive structures should be informed by organizational values. More often than not, employees are rewarded based on sales, customer acquisition, and user engagement. These metrics can sometimes run counter to ethical decision making.

If an organization wishes to reward behaviours in line with its values, possible incentive structures can include ethical bounties. Similar to bug bounties, ethical bounties reward employees when they identify decisions, processes, or features that are counter to the company’s values or cause harm to others or reward sales reps that share concerns about customer deals and avoid potential legal or public relations risk.

You may also include questions about ethical technology development in your hiring process. This sets the expectation for new employees that the ethical culture you’re building is important to the company and that ethical thinking and behaviour is rewarded.

Employee Support 

Responsible organizations provide resources to support employees and empower them to make decisions in line with the company’s values. This can include employee education (Trailhead is a great resource for this) and review boards to resolve difficult issues and ensure employees are following guidelines.

At Salesforce, we have a data science review board, which provides feedback on the quality and ethical considerations of our AI models, training data, and the applications that use them.

While building an ethical culture empowers employees to speak up when they have ethical concerns, you may want to also consider creating a clear, anonymous process for employees to submit concerns. Finally, checklists are great resources to provoke discussion and ensure that you don't overlook important concerns. Checklists, although consistent and easy to implement, are rarely exhaustive and must be clear and actionable to be useful. Because they enable employees to have difficult conversations, checklists help your company build an ethical culture from the ground up.

Documentation and Communication

Document decision making for transparency and consistency. If a team is at an ethical crossroads, documenting what is decided and why enables future teams to learn from that experience and act consistently rather than arbitrarily. Documentation and communication also give your employees and stakeholders confidence in your process and the resulting decisions.