We want to build an ethical, transparent culture together with our employees and customers and partners.  However, this can lead to situations in which our values seemingly contradict each other. Customer behavior and attitudes might lead to compromising our ethics and our commitment to our employees.

The following example highlights this dilemma. In a conversation after hours, a customer made clearly derogatory and sexist remarks. This made most in our team listening to these comments highly uncomfortable, and yet they were uncertain how to handle it. After all, this was the customer and it was after hours, and some in the team thought it was no big deal. The team struggled with if they should confront this or not. They were concerned that in the interest of maintaining a good relationship with the customer, they should stay quiet. They struggled with the commitment of not tolerating derogatory comments in the workplace while maintaining a positive relationship with the customer who was not acting properly.

Discussion question

• Have you experienced offensive comments from a customer?
• How did you approach it?
• What did you learn from it?

Things to consider

We can learn from these situations. They can help us apply foresight when truly living our values.

We can consider the following actions:

• Cultivate relationships with customers that enable us to provide honest feedback when needed.
• Discuss our values pro-actively and how actions – or not taking actions – can affect Skanska and customers.
• Display courage in expressing the right thing even when it may not be popular with our customers. Also when you are not directly targeted by the offensive comment.
• We do not accept any form of disrespectful behavior, bullying, discrimination, harassment, or unwanted sexual advances.

For guidelines on this topic read our Code of Conduct chapter on Bullying and harassment.