Ethical Issues in the Work Place

Latoya J Week 2 1/18/2012 Discussion 1 Analyze your current work (or School) environment through the lens of the content in Chapter 2 and determine the most significant ethical issue and its impact on overall productivity and moral. Explain your rationale. ? Although I have only been working at Saint Joseph’s University as temporary administrative assistant for a few short months, I have noticed one major discrepancy involving the registrars department of the university. The most significant ethical issue suffered by this particular department involves Lawrence Kohlberg’s social contract stage within the stages of moral development.
Kohlberg states that in the social contract stage although employees understand that there are rules and regulations they must follow in the work place, sometimes employees will break those rules to satisfy ones’ own wants and needs. (Hellriegel, Slocum, 2010) In Saint Joseph’s University’s registrar’s office I constantly see employees take off days just to get rest knowing there is a lot of work to be done. This current week in particular one of the receptionist took the week off to have a week relaxation in their hometown.
Unfortunately, this individual choose the most important week of the semester, the first week of a new semester. During this week students are not only visiting the registrar’s office with questions regarding things like classroom locations, teacher confirmations, registration errors and alterations, transcript requests, and graduation applications, they are also contacting us via telephone. Since there are only two receptionist her and myself, I was left to manage a lot of the traffic on my own. There is one other front office employee that orks in the registrar’s office who is not an assistant registrar so she was there to lend a helping hand at times, but she too has her own work to finish. Due to the absence of the other receptionist, the office was behind on completely transcripts in a timely manner that we received online through the National Clearinghouse. On Wednesday, January 18, 2012 we had a total of 40 missed calls accompanied by voicemails because the other phone line went unanswered during times when I was either with another student, on another call I could not put on hold, or the other front office employee was not able to answer it.

This caused a bit of stress within myself and the others within the office. Students were coming in so fast I was unable to appoint them to the correct assistant registrar to help them solve some of their questions because their offices were also over loaded with students, or faculty in need of classroom assignment alterations. Although I tried my best to help everyone, those individuals who needs were not met because we were shorthanded could possibly view the office as being unorganized as whole, or unprepared.
The registrar’s office need to enforce the importance of attendance at work, especially during the extremely busy times of the year. When one is slacks off on their job by being absent when their presence counts the most it makes it creates a ripple in the organization. In this particular case calls were left unanswered, students were forced to either come back to the office at a later time or leave their information in hopes of being contacted at a later time, and transcripts were not sent out as quickly as they normally are.