© 2025 SDPB Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Business Ethics During A Pandemic

Lori Walsh: The coronavirus economic disruption is forcing business owners and leaders into some very difficult decisions. How do you make choices about letting staff go? What's your responsibility to shareholders, to employees, to customers? How can you serve your community while keeping your doors open another day? Should you keep your doors open another day? Steve Priest is the founder of Integrity Insight International. It's a business ethics consulting firm. He's been doing business ethic works for 30 years in more than 50 countries with many of the world's largest companies. Steve, welcome back to In The Moment. Thanks for joining us.

Steve Priest: Hi Lori. It's great to be here, although of course circumstances are once in a lifetime, to say the least.

Lori Walsh: Tell us a little bit about ... you have experience working with companies in times of crisis, major companies all over the planet. This is, we keep hearing the word unprecedented. Is this unprecedented from a business standpoint in your opinion? Or do you find places where you think there are parallels?

Steve Priest: Unprecedented for sure. I mean I'm 59 and I've been doing this half ... I never figured that out, half of my life now. It's certainly unprecedented. Then, as the parallel everybody is citing is 1918 Spanish flu, and I wasn't alive then, and we've had crises, right? 2008, financial crisis, 2001, the terrorist strike on the World Trade Centers. These were devastating to the people involved with businesses, the people who were in those towers, but nothing like the widespread impact this has.

Lori Walsh: One of the challenges I'm guessing for business owners is there's compliance and what the law is, and it seems like every day we hear some other regulation was lifted or are things are being changed. So set the stage for us a little bit and tell us the difference between just obeying the law and compliance and ethics.

Steve Priest: I'm happy to do that, but first I want to say you introduced this topic just right, because there's ... how's that for sucking up to the host? There's no such thing as a business as a separate entity, a lifeless entity, right? Every business ... at a minimum, the business has an owner who's a person. If publicly traded, you have thousands of owners. So a business is made up of the people who own it, but in almost all cases, in a small town in South Dakota or the big city of Sioux Falls, there are also people involved. The employees are a critical part of a business. The customers, critical part, the impact and the interchange between the community and the business and suppliers and the business, fairly seamless, and if that's one lesson that we've needed reinforcing and we're getting it now, is that there's no such thing as an independent business or an isolated business.

In normal times, the first duty of a business in Sioux Falls or Chamberlain, South Dakota, or wherever, is compliance with the laws and regulations that apply to it. That's rule, that's law number one. Although I will say, even though that's the foundational element, comply with the law, don't break the law, companies and people break the law all the time, even on our 80 mile per hour speed limit interstate highways, truckers and drivers working for others are violating the speed limit, and that's just accepted as what people do. In all cases, the higher law, right, is ethics, and in the case of this moment, the highest law that applies seems to me is ... and I'm not making this up blind, this is at the heart of Christianity and it's the heart of Judaism, and if I knew the other major religious traditions better, I would cite them as well, that life comes first, right?

So our highest ethical imperative is to protect life. Life comes first, and what that means is thankfully it seems South Dakota and Sioux Falls politicians are square with the CDC. It means telling businesses, "Life comes first. Don't do dumb things that can expose your employees or customers to risk," and that's where that no more than 10 people who are six feet apart at all times ... which gets tricky yet even our local grocery stores. So that's the number one imperative for businesses today in South Dakota and your listening area is a life comes first. The money we'll figure out later. It's important, do no harm, life comes first, the mountain climbers ethos applies.

Lori Walsh: For people who are having to make difficult decisions about laying off employees, how do you think about that? Because we talk about vulnerable people from a coronavirus standpoint. They're also economically incredibly vulnerable people right now who are devastated. You close a restaurant, you send home your servers, that puts them in a tailspin in a lot of ways. What are some of the questions business owners should ask about their responsibilities to their employees?

Steve Priest: Yeah, the challenges are amazing and they're personal. I would urge business owners to have honest conversations with their people. The worst thing that could happen, is if a business closes its doors permanently. That doesn't help anybody. That doesn't help the owners, the communities, the employees, the suppliers. That whole interconnected web is gone. So if business owners can afford it, I think they should think back to two months ago, where most businesses in South Dakota were ... desperate is maybe too strong of a word, but were searching for more help, for more people, for people who could contribute to the success of their business. That was just two months ago, maybe a month and a half ago, that there were articles everywhere about restaurants and bars and manufacturers and distributors and healthcare companies desperately searching for people.

So remember that and remember how hard it is to get good people and remember that this too shall pass. It might take longer than we'd wish, but this too shall pass and you will want good people, and we know how expensive it is to find and hire good people. So that would be something I would urge business owners to be keeping in mind as they're making tough decisions, and then I'd say have honest conversations with your employees, because for the most part, in South Dakota we're talking about not huge businesses. We're talking about businesses with tens or hundreds of people. Some of these employees because of concerns about the health of their parents or children or relatives, or because of school closing and inability to find good childcare might prefer to have an extended period of time off, and you could negotiate that, or people might prefer part-time, and then there are many people who are in really hard straights, as you described, and you would want to make the most accommodations for them.

So I would say think longterm and have honest conversations about your people, knowing that you have to look at facts and say for some of the businesses that are ... especially in the hospitality services area, hotels, restaurants, bars, it's probably going to be 60-90 days and they might not have the cashflow to pay every employee their full wage then, and then I would come back around to ... sorry, I'm monologuing ... to us, to our responsibility as consumers right? If we have businesses that we've counted on and love, let's do what we can. Let's do the takeout. Let's do the curbside pickup. Let's buy the gift cards to help them get through this. This is obviously going to be challenging cashflow time.

I have a good story from yesterday. I was with my ... 59 years old, my body is wrecked, so I was getting a therapeutic massage from a professional, and she's had lots of cancellations and she said, "I don't know how I'm going to make my rent." So she communicated with her landlord and they said, "Don't worry about it. Pay us what you can now. We're all in this together." That brings tears to my eyes, but that's what South Dakota and South Dakota businesses are really about, right? It is. We're not that big. We can take care of each other. We can make individual exceptions and accommodations for this extraordinary time.

Lori Walsh: Steve Priest is founder of Integrity Insight International. So many more questions for you, Steve, but we're going to have to let you go for today and hopefully you'll come back in the future. We can dive a little deeper. Make those choices with other people's lives in mind. Great advice. Thanks, Steve.

Steve Priest: Thank you. Vote with your dollars.

You access all of SDPB's COVID-19 coverage at www.sdpb.org/covid

Tags