HSBC Bank is one of the world’s largest financial institutions with 6,600 branch offices in 80 countries and all continents. Presumably, the bank does extensive human resources training across numerous platforms to teach its employees things such as sensitivity to different cultures, diversity, religious tolerance and the like. However, as I repeatedly note, watered-down HR 
training is not the same thing as ethical training, and does not teach good decision making skills. HSBC Ethics training – effective or not?
The number one complaint I heard at the recent Society for Human Resource Management meeting (SHRM) was that the type of training that was associated with ethics and compliance produced little to no results when employees were faced with serious ethical issues.
A prime example of my point is an incident that occurred at an HSBC in the U.K. about a month ago at one of those “team building” events that happen all so frequently around the warmer months of the year.
At some point during the break in the action of this meeting, a group of employees thought it would be hilarious to stage a mock execution. According to Cassandra Vinograd writing for NBC News, “HSBC Staff Fired for Mock ISIS Execution Video,” it was stated:
“A group of HSBC employees has been fired after a video emerged online which showed a mock ISIS-style execution, the bank confirmed Tuesday.
Britain’s The Sun newspaper posted a video online which it said was filmed at a corporate team-building event. The video shows a man kneeling in an orange jumpsuit as five men dressed in black wearing balaclavas stand behind him. One of the men dressed in black wields a coat hanger — apparently in place of a knife — and a shout of ‘Allahu Akhbar’ is heard.”
The least important aspect to the story is that a video was taken and posted, though I will agree it was an absolutely stupid thing to do.
That the workers were fired over it should be a “given.” That it was made in the first place requires much deeper exploration.
How we train our employees…
The video showing the mock execution offended just about everyone, from Muslims to those murdered by ISIS to the millions of people at war in the Middle East and the many more in the Christian, Jewish and non-sectarian world who have tried to build fragile bridges. Obviously, the video is an isolated incident and “millions” weren’t offended, but clearly any customer of HSBC was given pause.
Presumably, those in the video are at some level of lower or middle management. Team building events are not usually the domain of custodial staff or ATM servicing. I will presume as well, that these individuals were given some type of training by HR. It obviously rolled in one ear and out the other, but in this case it was 12 ears. In fact, six employees were a party to this and not one of them raised much of an objection.
I wonder if the video was “filmed” in front of others at the team building event. Did no one say, “Hey fellows, this is a really bad idea, don’t you think?”
Videos go viral, you see. Poor ethics do as well.
Ethics Training…
It leads me to an important point about ethics training. In my opinion, as someone who does this for a living, an employee goes to an HR presentation on topics such as diversity or religious tolerance, and is generally taught. It is a one sided exchange. Frankly, most people block out most of what is said.
When an employee goes into ethical training, about making good decisions for themselves and their companies, the training is done to get employees to think. Ethical training is more open to interpretation and to encouraging the exchange of ideas, viewpoints and differing perspectives. In an HR training many employees hear, “don’t do that.” In ethics training, we might explore, “why shouldn’t you do that?”
Six employees exposed to ethics would very well conclude that making fun of someone’s religion and the torment of extremism is probably not a very good idea.
Decision makers and not corporate drones are what good ethics should nurture within an organization. In this case, six drones lost their employment.
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