The wrong way to handle business ethics: A real life example

It’s easy to get astray.

Some people sacrifice their reputation and values for money.

Some people think being short on financial resources justifies dodgy turns into the legal grey zone.

Some people see employees and contractors as resources like CPUs, RAM, and disk on a cloud server which you can turn up and down at any time, with zero notice period.

What does this have to do with business ethics? Well, more than you think. All entrepreneurs out there, how many times did you have to fight an unforeseen situation? How many of these unforeseen situations maneuvered your business into an uncomfortable position? And how many times did you have to cut corners to find your way out of those uncomfortable positions?

Don’t get me wrong, turning corners is a perfectly ethical business practice, especially for startups and medium-sized enterprises that don’t operate on the luxury of a corporate budget. However, cutting corners needs to stay within legal — and yes, ethical — boundaries.

Legal boundaries are clear, but ethical boundaries are vague and depend on your moral compass.

Here is a true story we experienced at Yonder. We used to work with an agency that provided us with dedicated virtual assistants to help us with admin work and customer support.

Ignoring the warning signs

At the beginning, everything worked well. The only thing that didn’t work very well is that our customer success manager wasn’t reachable very well. When we didn’t need him, he checked in all the time. When we needed him, he showed up late for calls, and when he finally showed up, there were connectivity issues. It could have been a warning sign, but since everything worked fine with our virtual assistants, I ignored the warning sign.

A few months into the business relationship with that agency, there was an issue with one of the agents. I assigned her a task that needed to be executed urgently, and she wasn’t available during the agreed business hours. When she was available again, she told me that she would have deactivated the Microsoft Teams messages and therefore didn’t see my messages. Later on, I found out that there was an issue in a family and she was not working that day. Life happens, but I don’t like it when people don’t tell me the truth.

So I contacted our customer success manager and asked for an attendance report of the virtual assistant. What I got shocked me. The account manager sent me screenshots from a conversation in Microsoft Teams between the virtual assistant and myself. I was bluntly told that all their virtual assistants were required to share screenshots from their work with the agency for quality assurance purposes — the agency measures quality by looking at the reply times between a request from a customer and a reply from a virtual assistant. While just looking at the reply times but not at the quality of the result is a questionable quality characteristic, the very reason I reached out to our customer success manager was exactly because reply times were bad. Ironic.

Changing course and taking action

Now, the warning signs couldn’t be ignored anymore. Sharing information between my virtual assistants and an agency without my prior consent is a no-go, both under data privacy considerations as well as from a good business practice perspective.

So I decided to do two things: First, to set up an agreement with the agency, exempting our virtual assistants from providing any business-related information for quality assurance purposes. Second, to part ways with the virtual assistant who couldn’t explain her absence.

Setting up the agreement was a challenge on its own. The agency told me they have a standard agreement for cases like that. After several iterations by email, I ended up writing the agreement myself. The agency didn’t even manage to set up an electronic signature workflow without errors, so I ended up doing this task myself, too.

Parting ways with an employee or contractor is never easy. But I always try to do this fairly. As usual, I terminated the virtual assistant by respecting the notice periods. Only 10 days later did I learn that the agency terminated her immediately, leaving me in the rain with the tasks that were still open.

Bombing out the remaining assistant

After each episode described above, the agency insisted that this would have been a single occurrence. But over time, it became clear that this agency would suffer from systematic shortcomings. Therefore, I decided to end the business relationship with the agency.

But before I could do that, I had to get the other virtual assistant out. We had invested a lot of time into his training, and he is doing a great job.

After talking to management, here is the exact wording I got to get the assistant transferred from the agency to our global payroll:

“While we don’t officially conduct buy-outs, we have done so a few times in the past with clients who had been with us for more than a year. As a reference point, those clients have paid us 5x the monthly subscription to hire their assistant directly. Now, I understand that you’ve had a difficult experience with our service, and I sympathize with that — hence, I’d like to offer you to hire [assistant name] directly for twice the monthly subscription amount.

To address your request for not incurring a “penalty fee,” I’d like to highlight that the buy-out amount is a minimum compromise in your favor. [Agency] is still a young startup with a burn rate (even though we may appear big for marketing purposes), and I must act in a way that is fair to all stakeholders, including especially my co-founders.”

All said. Glad to put this story behind us.

This article is also published on the author's blog.​ illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.