On a daily basis, we are constantly faced with making decisions that are honest or not; however, in the workplace these decisions can have more serious repercussions that can endanger your business reputation, the company, and potentially harm those around you. By focusing on one event in particular that occurred during my summer internship, I hope that the lesson learned from my past decision will benefit me throughout my business career and serve as a touchstone for any difficult decisions I were to make in the future. During my time as a marketing intern for an oil and gas company, I quickly realized that an office environment is one in which trust is fully given to employees in terms of project completions, meeting deadlines, attendance at scheduled meetings, and the accurate input of hours worked into the employee database. My ethical dilemma was the latter.
After making friends with my fellow interns, many disclosed to me that they were entering a full day of work into the database regardless of if they were late, absent, or leaving early. They even suggested that I do it myself since I was working on much more difficult and time consuming projects. It was then that the idea of falsifying my hours began to conflict with my current behavior of being honest and accurate in my record keeping. I reminded them that if managers were to ever get suspicious they could easily track our work badges to the hours we worked and if management were to find a discrepancy between the two it could potentially result in our termination. They disregarded this as a deterrent to their behavior and provided the reasoning that their decision to get bigger paychecks would not hurt the company, especially one that is in the oil and gas industry.
After a frustratingly difficult two weeks of