The Price of Ethics (and the Cost of Ignoring It)
By Lisa, ChewingRice Principal Director
When leaders talk about “ethics,” we tend to split it into lanes: internal policy, anti-corruption, Diversity, Inclusion, data privacy and the external lanes: customer outcomes, market integrity, supplier conduct, community impact, environmental footprint. Useful, but siloed. In reality these are different symptoms of one system: how decisions get made, who gets heard, and what is ultimately greenlit. That system is what I mean by ethics, an operating model that shows up in products, journeys and behaviour. Price follows: trust, growth and the cost of capital move with the quality of that system.That’s why these two myths keep costing companies real money:
Myth 1: Ethics = compliance.
Compliance is the baseline. It protects you from obvious failure. It does not create trust, customer loyalty, or better products. An ethical culture, the real thing, shows up in everyday decisions: who gets promoted, which customers we design for, which risks we accept. When that culture is healthy, it compounds into very commercial outcomes: lower complaints upheld, faster first-contact resolution, better retention, stronger lender confidence. An ethical business isn’t a “nice to have”, it’s the operating system.
Myth 2: “Culture is soft.”
Culture is only “soft” until it hits the P&L (Profit & Loss). Hiring is expensive. Attrition drains momentum. Complaints swallow the time you should be spending on your product. If staff don’t feel safe to speak up, problems that could be dealt with internally turn into public crises. If incentives conflict with stated values, guess which one wins. For organisations raising capital, weak conduct and customer-outcome signals show up as friction in due diligence.
What does this look like in practice? One example: we brought a product team and a customer-service team into the same room, something that had never happened at that client organisation. It was tense at first. But the conversation changed the digital journey in concrete ways and drove a 25% increase in usage of their online financial tools within a quarter. No slogan did that. People did, when they could tell the truth to each other and were empowered to act on it.
There’s also the quieter innovation cost. Breakthroughs rarely arrive via a formal steering committee. They come from the edges: a frontline colleague who sees a pattern before anyone else; a junior engineer with a sharper way to solve an old problem; an intern (remember Jewel Ham with Spotify Wrapped) with a deceptively simple idea that customers love. If the environment doesn’t make it safe and worthwhile to share those ideas, you won’t hear them, until a competitor releases them.
So where can you practically start, this quarter?
Map your incentives to your intentions. Write down your top three cultural commitments. Now write down the top three incentives (financial or otherwise) that actually drive behaviour. Where they clash, behaviour will follow the incentive. Fix one clash. Not all of them. One.
Good policies are important but what does the full staff-to-customer journey look like - What are your internal pain points and how does this impact your customers? E.g. High attrition means a break in continuity for customers. View the whole staff and customer experience as one journey rather than two separate ends of the business. Create environments that break silos between product, operations, customer service, HR and risk. Start small with a 2-hour brainstorming meeting with representatives from each division on mapping this journey.
Choose a single outcome metric to move by 20% in six months. Not ten metrics. One. It could be first-contact resolution, upheld complaint rate, time-to-resolution on speak-up cases, or usage of a new product for an underserved customer segment. Make a named executive owner accountable. Review weekly. Remove obstacles.
A final thought: ethics is often seen as an expense - I think it’s better to view ethics as the discipline of building trust and sustainable long-term growth. Trust is not abstract. It is a series of decisions that either make customers’ lives easier or harder; that either make it safer for staff to tell the truth or riskier.
Let us know your thoughts on the ethical operating system of your organisation. Where do you see room for transformation?
Interested in how to do this? Book a free 30-minute informal chat about your challenges, all conversations are treated as strictly confidential.
