Having the moral authority to act ethically

In a follow-up to CABE’s Ethics and Professional Commitment webinar, Chief Executive Richard Harral explains why, in such a high-stakes industry, building engineers must be empowered and given the confidence to act, first and foremost, in the public’s interest – especially when cost and time pressures and contractual mechanisms can put members in challenging situations.

In Richard Harral’s mind, professional ethics in the built environment is easy to define.
"We’re talking about an awareness and mindfulness in the way people are going to be affected by the decisions that building engineers make and the advice they give," he explains.

By people, he is referring to those who are put at risk, particularly the residents, who must live with the consequences of any substandard, unsafe, design or construction work. Richard admits that ‘one of the great difficulties’ in the built environment is that individuals working on a project can feel removed from the building’s end use and its eventual occupants.

"We have a big task to make sure that longer-term safety is a prominent piece in everyone’s thinking all the time," he says. 

"There is a risk that end users can fade into the background given all of the other immediate cost and time pressures involved in delivering projects, and in a way that’s not so true of some other health and safety regimes."

As Richard outlines in CABE’s recent webinar on Ethics and Professional Commitment, the building engineering profession does have a whole range of tools at its disposal to help members make the right decisions when faced with difficult situations.

Having said that, "What we need to ensure is that from the early stages of people’s careers, they’re factoring ethical considerations into what they do and how they behave, and that they have the support to continue to do that throughout the rest of their careers," he says.

The stakes are very high in business and transactional terms and so it’s inevitable that people will face ethical issues on a day-to-day basis. Even if they’re not on the frontline within project teams, there is a wide range of ethical issues in relation to employment, the way that we work with others and the way we treat other people that also need to be part of their professional toolkit."

Shadow Grenfell casts

Undoubtedly the fallout from Grenfell has raised those stakes further and, as Richard explains, the entire industry must re-examine the way it thinks and works. Professional ethics is one of the most important areas where capacity must be rebuilt, he argues.

"It’s fair to say that ethical considerations were hollowed out of the process over time," he explains, pointing to the cost and time pressures as well as the contractual mechanisms that placed [and continue to exert] enormous pressures on building engineers.

"As a result, the safeguards that [ethical behaviours] provide have been diminished or in some case disappeared. It’s critical to remember that it’s the decisions that people make that really are the safeguards the system relies on. The system itself cannot identify or manage risk. It’s reliant on someone within that process identifying a problem and forcing a better resolution."

CABE’s webinar explores in detail why professional ethics and a commitment to professional values is so important, but Richard explains that there are two ways that building engineers should think about this – at an individual and an organisational level.

"It’s about people having the right awareness and confidence to deal with these issues in a way that is responsible and constructive because you cannot clash with everybody all the time," he says about the former.

"You’ve got to have the right way to talk about issues [and] find solutions that work better, but it’s also really important that we look at the organisational component."
Richard says this comes down to the importance of corporate leaders prioritising safety culture and driving it forward consistently with real commitment. 

"It is so easy for other pressures to start to displace that safety culture thinking [and so] you must have a very strong drive to embrace it and ensure it is properly embedded," he argues.

"If you have a strong safety culture within businesses and within project teams and supply chains, then there’s a really good chance that someone’s going to pick up and deal with risks at some stage in that process."

Critical concepts for professional behaviour

As members that watch the webinar will find, the building engineer’s professional behaviour is underpinned by some important concepts. As Richard points out, the most important is grasping ‘the public interest test’ and making sure they don’t let their personal interests in delivering the services they provide take undue precedence. 

"We cannot get away from the fact that what we do imposes impacts on other people over time, so it’s making sure that those impacts consider the wider effects of those decisions. That could be safety, it could be sustainability, it could be accessibility," he explains.

"Balancing commercial interests with wider societal interests and values is really important and that needs to be built into every building engineer’s psychology; it’s a fundamental part of doing their job well."

The second critical concept that building engineers need to factor in is managing the limits of their competence.

"It’s almost impossible to overemphasise how important this is in the UK where we have a self-regulatory model and are expected to police our own behaviours," he says.

Being mindful of the limits of their own competence means that building engineers should not be afraid to inform other stakeholders that they are not the right person to undertake a particular task if they don’t feel they have the correct knowledge, skills or experience to perform it well, he explains.

"It is critical that we don’t trip over these boundaries where we’re being adventurous with the promise we’re making to people about our competence to do so properly."

Another important area that Richard discusses in the webinar is the meaning and structure of professional commitment. 

Competency counts

Mention of it prompts him to highlight CABE’s competence framework, which draws on the Engineering Council’s United Kingdom specification for competence and commitment (UK-SPEC), and is essentially "a distilled set of characteristics that a good building engineer should possess".

The Professional Commitment section of the framework comprises five building blocks – working in compliance with codes of conduct; managing and applying safe systems of work; understanding the principles of sustainability; carrying out and recording suitable CPD (in other words managing and maintaining competence); and acting ethically. As Richard notes, the framework works as a useful tool to help building engineers achieve better outcomes.

"Members have to remain aware of changes in the context they’re working in, whether that’s legislation or technology," he says.

"They need to understand if expectations are changing from government, from society, from clients but also, realistically, they should be on a continuous improvement pathway as a professional throughout their career and we’re doing a lot of work to try and put structure around that."

Richard explains that in 2021-22, CABE overhauled the framework so that it now includes a series of additional guidance documents that were published by the professional body, the Engineering Council and the Royal Academy. These cover important considerations such as safe systems of work, the principles of sustainability, construction ethics, whistleblowing and security. He urges members to consult the updated framework.

"Those guidance documents really do help as a refresher to remind us about our responsibilities and the options we have to get better outcomes," he says.

"They’re all mandatory annexes to the competence framework [and are designed] to help members imagine how these values need to be applied in practice."

Code of Practice webinar

Turning to the Code of Practice, Richard says CABE plans to run a webinar on it in the coming months, in part to highlight the mandatory expectations placed on members. 
Although many are aware of the principles-based standards that CABE applies, he explains that there are also requirements around self-reporting, around co-operation and collaboration with the professional body, and around undertaking CPD.

"Sometimes we’ve been made aware of members who’ve had legal proceedings that they should have reported or sanctions by other professional bodies," he explains.

"They need to understand that the reporting doesn’t mean that they are necessarily going to be sanctioned by us. Reporting these events means that we can assess whether there’s any further investigation we need to do to check that they remain a professional in good standing and that we can continue to hold out to the public that they can be trusted."

Richard adds that the fundamental reason for having the code is to set expectations for professionals to live by, but also to hold them to account if they’re acting in a way that doesn’t meet those standards and particularly if they pose a risk to the public.

"The webinar will cover this and then look at the principles-based standards to try and exemplify some of the real-world issues that play into the different standards," he says.
Another reason for running the webinar is to make sure all members have got access to a 'narrative explanation' of the code, how it works, why it’s there and to support them in the work they do. 

Returning to where he started, Richard emphasises how moving the end users from the background to the foreground when making decisions is not the sole responsibility of the building engineering profession but is a ‘cross industry piece’. 

"We all need to be doing it," he says concluding. "[For our members], it’s about giving them the confidence to raise risks responsibly. It’s also important to understand how to use the Code of Conduct to explain that you’re working within an important framework of expectations – it’s not just what you think or want to do. We do have the tools; and we will continue to work to knit them together and help members to use them to best effect."

Watch the Ethics and Professional Commitment webinar below.