Time for HR to Act

Today's newspapers carried an interesting headline about an employee of Infosys (the Bangalore-based IT major) who realised that he was late for a flight and called up the airport at Delhi with a hoax bomb threat in order to delay the flight. The police were waiting for him at the airport and promptly arrested him. The highly respected IT company must have been quite embarassed by this incident. Equally, readers were surprised that an Infosys employee could have done something like this.
Despite training initiatives on ethics, all companies have employees who like to tread the thin ice when it comes to the right and the wrong. These are clever people who know how the system works and how to manipulate the system. Obviously educating them on BE is like pouring water on a hard rock. So how can a company identify and weed out such employees?
As the saying goes, a job well begun is half done. So the right place to filter persons who have a propensity for dabbling with reputation risks is at the time of recruitment. Unfortuately, psychometric tests focus mostly on job-oriented behaviour patterns like team working, leadership, decision making, etc and hardly on the ethical quotient of candidates. What companies need urgently are psychometric tests that can provide good indicators of the ethical mindsets of the people they wish to employ.
Profiling mechanisms for identifying growth and leadership potential of employees rarely include ethical parameters. So do performance appraisals. We know that recognising performance or potential that was short on ethical aspects has been at the root of most corporate scams of recent years. HR specialists argue that ethical behaviour is not included in formal appraisals since this is taken as a given. We have a nice proverb in my native language that says "The cat closes its eyes and imagines that the entire world is asleep" !!
It's time for HR to take greater accountablity for bringing some fundamental changes in the management of the people aspects of Business Ethics.