Reputational damage

From ensuring your competency to thinking twice before you use social media, professional responsibility can be a minefield – CABE CEO Richard Harral suggests a path through.

In recent years, the construction industry – including building professionals – has suffered a great deal of reputational damage. There were the processes that became so routine as to escape scrutiny; the commercial pressures that trumped all other considerations; and the professional roles that were performed in line with standardised expectation, rather than with clarity of professional judgement. In moving forward, we need to acknowledge these and develop an overarching set of principles that we apply to the work we do that helps us ensure the right outcome.

These principles can be described as ethics, if you want to get philosophical about it, but the reality remains that cost and time pressures and contractual mechanisms regularly put members in challenging situations. There has to be something to help building engineers navigate their professional responsibilities. “They must be empowered to act, first and foremost, in the public’s interest. We’re talking about an awareness and a mindfulness in the way people are going to be affected by the decisions that building engineers make and the advice they give,” CABE CEO Richard Harral says.

“We need to ensure that from the early stages of people’s careers, they’re factoring these 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.” (This is something Prof Luke Bisby advocates for on page 38.)

Multimedia

It’s this mention of early career and student building engineers that raises a critical and contemporary element of professional responsibility for consideration: use of multimedia and social media. Even digital natives can fall short of expected professional behaviour online.

We live in a culture of instant global communications. It can be overwhelming, as well as blur the boundaries between professional and personal lives. It’s easy to send an email, text, WhatsApp message or social media post that is reactionary, jokey or hasn’t been well thought through, either professionally or outside of working life. In both circumstances this can cause untold damage to professional reputation.

As much as it is possible to do, stop and consider who will see any of your communications and how they might make them view you. Once it is out there it is impossible to retract.

This is a good rule of thumb for any social media post or online comment, as there are plenty of instances of people posting misjudged or inappropriate comments who have been identified by employers (and future employers) who then terminated their employment. However, you could argue that having a robust set of personal ethics would help people to avoid making these comments in the first place.

For professional communications, this means that as quick and easy as it is to respond, it can still be worthwhile taking a few moments to consider if what you are saying can be misinterpreted.

CABE offers guidance in its Code of Professional Conduct, which states: “Professional behaviour is founded in being professionally competent, civil and polite regardless of circumstances; ensuring that you act fairly to all parties setting aside your own interests; and ensuring that you provide professional advice and services that reflect your duty of care to clients, co-workers and the wider public. Building engineers have a duty to uphold the highest standards of professional conduct, openness, fairness, honesty and integrity.”

Conduct

Professional conduct, then, is based on the practical application of a set of personal ethics. “It’s critical to remember that it’s the decisions that people make that really are the safeguards the system relies on,” Harral says.

He 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. This became particularly apparent in the Grenfell Tower Inquiry. “It’s fair to say that ethical considerations were hollowed out of the process over time.” There is a professional responsibility to question accepted norms.

CABE’s Code of Professional Conduct, therefore, sets expectations for professionals to live by and to support them in their work by defining expectations, but also to hold them to account if they’re acting in a way that doesn’t meet those standards. “Sometimes we’ve been made aware of members who’ve had legal proceedings that they should have reported or sanctions by other professional bodies. 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.”

Competence

Managing limits of competence is the cornerstone of professional responsibility, ethical behaviour and reputation. “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,” Harral says.

CABE has seen examples of members drawn into difficulty on projects where they have taken on more responsibility than they should have – as laudable as the intentions are, there is no legal cover and ethically you can’t guarantee the standard of the work. Being mindful of the limits of your own competence means that building engineers should not be afraid to inform other stakeholders if they don’t feel they have the correct knowledge, skills or experience to perform a specific task well.

CABE’s Code states: “Building engineers have a duty to comply with all applicable laws and regulations and give due weight to facts, published standards, official codes of practice, guidance and the wider public interest [and] accept appropriate responsibility for work they undertake or which is carried out under their supervision.” And CABE’s competence framework is a useful tool to support this.

Harral agrees that building engineers have to be aware of the changing expectations of their roles and “realistically, they should be on a continuous improvement pathway as a professional throughout their career”.

From conduct to competence to behaving responsibly online, the industry has some way to go to repair its reputation and rebuild trust. It is CABE’s firm belief that understanding these professional responsibilities and applying ethical frameworks in day-to-day practice is the best way for building engineers to do this. CABE’s resources are there to support and, as Harral says, help us navigate “the options we have to get better outcomes”.

Watch CABE’s webinar on Ethics and Professional Commitment at b.link/CABEweb_ethics
Watch CABE’s Code of Conduct webinar at cbuilde.com/page/code-of-conduct-webinar
Read CABE’s Code of Professional Conduct at b.link/CABE_CoPC
Read CABE’s Guide to Ethical Professionalism at b.link/CABE_GEP

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