In the autumn of 2020 when it was abundantly obvious the global COVID pandemic was having wide-ranging impacts on businesses of all sizes as well as their employees and stakeholders, the Ethics and Compliance Initiative established a Working Group to research and produce a White Paper titled "Positioning Ethics and Compliance as a Strategic Leader in Times of Stress or Crisis." With my long history in advocating for and teaching about the importance of creating sustainably healthy, humane, and harmonious workplaces framed by ethically intelligent leadership, I was thrilled to be invited to join this project.

 

Our Working Group was initially spilt into two subgroups focused upon researching both Internal and External factors. As contributing team members, both myself and fellow team member Kalwant Kaur (who is also passionate about educating about the adverse impacts that chronic stress and pressure has upon individuals, teams, leadership, and overall workplace culture has upon mind-body-spirit well-being) proposed that unaddressed/improperly addressed workplace stress also creates an ethical risk to any business. We insisted that education about the harmful multi-level impacts of chronic high-level stress has upon employees themselves be a component of our project in the form of a learning resources Toolkit. However, root causes of chronic workplace stress must also be addressed, and not simply recommend "band-aid" remedies to soothe the symptoms, and leave the challenge of "managing it" squarely upon the shoulders of the employees themselves.

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It became clear early on that including this information in the White Paper would make it unwieldily in both size and scope. Our Working Group Team proposed to ECI that we create a companion Stress Readiness, Responsiveness and Resiliency Toolkit Project that would provide comprehensive information about stress, pressure, anxiety, and burnout, as well as recommending a "whole systems" approach to teach how to address root causes of workplace stress and pressure. ​While we worked within our individual subgroups to produce the White Paper, I was tasked with leading the Toolkit Site and companion Learning Project Team to provide a roadmap for how anyone can truly be a Strategic Leader in Times of Stress or Crisis. 

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Once the White Paper was completed and published, Kalwant and I offered a year-long multi-media resources and educational support program exclusively for ECI members. Click here to read more about this Learning Project.

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Although the Toolkit website is now closed and Webinars created on behalf of ECI have concluded, the educational work encompassed by this Learning Project continues to be both timely and essential, as we still have a long ways to go to create workplace cultures that are healthy, harmonious, and humane with unbreakable leadership integrity.