Drawing on work or personal examples, analyse how you would/have known when and how to raise concerns when issues such as organisational policies or leadership approaches conflict with ethical values or legislation. (1.5)
One of our role as people professionals is to ensure that the organisation was up at per with any legal laws and conducted its business ethically (Tursunbayeva et al., 2021). When I was just a new hire at my organisation, I was reviewing employment contracts to get familiar with roles and the organisation’s employment terms and policies. After reviewing the contracts I came to the realization that the organisation had a huge gender pay gap disparity. Men were paid way more compared to the women on the same role with the men’s income increasing by a 5% rate higher than the women. Furthermore, to avoid any conflict the employees were mandated to sign a non-disclosure agreement. It felt wrong and the organisation risked facing legal repercussions if the matter came to light. Since I was new and did not want to raise any alarm I took time to study the chain of command and who would best help solve the matter. Before the next executive meeting I approached the senior head of HR and brought the issue to light. He was surprised to get wind of the matter and asked me to make a presentation on the new employment law changes and need to change organisational policies that I would present during the meeting to help the top decision makers to understand why it was a matter of urgency. Sure enough my presentation was well received with top management noting that it had been while since the policies were evaluated, reviewed and updated hence the need to do so before any issues occurred.