Question

Henri Ross, Director of HR at GreyCloud Inc., sat at the conference table looking at his
team. He had called the meeting to discuss what interventions they could implement to
improve the situation at the company.  It had been a long year and performance
seemed to be stagnating. Also, some recent mistakes had resulted in faulty products
being shipped to customers and the production department was raising alarms about
the costs of replacements. 
Henri had also heard numerous complaints about the managers’ performance. They
reportedly called multiple daily meetings that took employees away from their work, and
they would reportedly bombard employees with numerous email messages after work
hours requesting updates on their progress.  Henri had brought his team together to find
solutions to this communication problem. 
Rena suggested they implement a quiet-time program because she had read scientific
studies showing that blocking a few hours per day when no one scheduled meetings or
sent/responded to email was documented to improve productivity by 5%.  Not only that,
but the program required no investment or training, and could be implemented with one
simple memo. 
George wasn’t convinced. He had also read some research on quiet-time programs,
and it showed that when people blocked all communication during certain hours, it had
a negative impact on coordination. By forbidding people from contacting each other at
certain times of the day, problems would go unresolved while people waited for needed
information or assistance. Not only that, but he thought it might tempt managers to send
even more messages after hours to make up for the lack of communication during the
day. Given the current performance plateau, George was worried that quiet-time would
be a barrier to facilitating performance improvements, might exacerbate their
communication issues, and would not do anything to reduce the faulty products that
were being produced. He thought they needed to put together a task force to explore
how to improve production. 
Rena did not agree. She felt that allowing people to concentrate was the clear path to
improve productivity and reduce production errors. George still wasn’t sure. He didn’t
see how blocking a few hours in the day would change the managers’ behavior or
resolve their production problems. 
At that point, Henri interjected: “I hear what you are saying George, but quiet-time
seems more certain to work than a task force. The impact may be modest, but it will get
us going in a positive direction and that’s what we need at this juncture. Improving
productivity by 5% could make an important difference for us. A task-force has a lot of
potential, but sometimes they go nowhere, and the benefit of shifting people from their
regular duties to the task force is too uncertain. There could be a big pay-off later, but
we really don’t know.  I’ve made my decision. Let’s send the quiet-time memo out
ASAP.”
QUESTION
Apply the concept of ethics to Henri’s decision to implement the mindfulness training
program at GreyCloud Inc., and explain how the decision-making concepts under
the textbook heading of “Problem Identification and Framing” could have
influenced whether Henri made an ethical decision. In your answer, be sure to provide
a rationale as to why you think Henri’s decision was ethical or not, and make sure to
include a word count with your answer.
Word Limit: 500