By Kelsey Loftin and Myles Cryer
Technical communicators make ethical decisions every day, even though sometimes we might not recognize them as such. From signing off on word choice and phrasing to removing or redacting information, from deciding how to visually present complex data to choosing which images are appropriate for certain projects, ethical decisions permeate every aspect of our profession.
In 1998, the Society for Technical Communication adopted a set of ethical principles that embody what we as technical communicators strive to uphold in our everyday professional activities. Each technical communicator faces different ethical challenges in his or her day-to-day work. Although many of the ethical issues we face may feel mundane, it is important to understand the technical communicator’s critical role in ensuring that public good is upheld and that we honor both our profession and the stakeholders who rely on our work.
In the following article, we offer a few common scenarios that technical communicators encounter every day as related to the six ethical principles set forth by STC. In doing so, we hope to help professional communicators better prepare for the everyday ethical decisions that make up so much of our work, because while our choices may appear mundane, even the smallest decisions may have large implications.
Legality
We observe the laws and regulations governing our profession.
You are working with the product marketing manager (PMM) to iron out the messaging at the beginning of your data sheet. You have sent the latest draft to the legal department, and they changed “ensure” to “make sure” to protect the company from inadvertently guaranteeing to provide a service it is not prepared to deliver. The PMM is concerned that the messaging doesn’t flow as well as it did before the change and rejects the comment in track changes, moving the project forward with the original verbiage in place.
Honesty
We seek to promote the public good in our activities. To the best of our ability, we provide truthful and accurate communications.
As a major incident manager (MIM), you direct the technical experts in the field while communicating progress and problems to the customer. You are under a great deal of pressure to meet service level agreements (SLAs) and to provide the customer with hourly updates. The content of your communications must be vetted by the team to solidify rhetoric and verbiage before it is sent to the customer. Not only do these actions happen rapidly, but there are various hands in the editing process. You are new to the team and are taking notes during the technical conference call. One of the senior MIMs tells you to remove something from the customer communication because “the customer doesn’t need to know that.” The rest of the team agrees, and someone points out that you have two minutes to send the update. But as you look at the update from the customer’s viewpoint, the omitted content appears to be business-critical information.
Confidentiality
We respect the confidentiality of our clients, employers, and professional organizations.
You are preparing a customer-facing PowerPoint deck that focuses on the capabilities of your company’s improved remote desktop service. The engineering team has built a demo environment for the sales team to present to prospects that includes data from a current customer in order to establish a genuine use case, and the team has provided you with screenshots to include in your PowerPoint deck. As you are working on the deck, you notice that IP addresses, user names, and confidential security configurations are shown in many of the screenshots. In order to protect your client’s confidentiality and to prevent any possible security breaches, you present your concerns to the engineering team and suggest that they create dummy data specifically for the demo environment. The project deadline is fast approaching, and there are still a number of features left to finalize. Engineering is reluctant to spend time building a clean data set and insists that perfecting the new features should remain their top priority.
Quality
We endeavor to produce excellence in our communication products.
There is a lot of pressure on you from the product manager (PM) to publish core customer-facing documents before the big launch. However, you didn’t receive the information you needed from the engineering team to complete the documents until the last minute. You finish the documents and send them to the PM for review, and in the same email you remind him that the documents need to be sent through corporate editing before you can publish. He signs off on the documents and pushes you to publish while the documents are under review because the launch is in two days, and corporate editing can take up to a week to respond.
Fairness
We serve the business interests of our clients and employers as long as they are consistent with the public good.
You work as a researcher for a prominent senator, and she has asked for a condensed report on the latest scientific findings surrounding climate change and the most trusted measurements for tracking atmospheric trends. While she did not directly ask you to present the information in a way that supports her widely known opinion, you have heard stories of other researchers who were demoted to less exciting projects after producing reports that did not align to her fixed view. Scientists have found that the most reliable way to track climate change trends is over a period of decades, which reveals results that differ from the senator’s opinion. However, the majority of the available reports you have found present yearly trend results over a much narrower period of 17 years. Every trend graph in these reports begins with the same record high year, manipulating the data to show a steady drop in global temperatures.
Professionalism
We advance technical communication through our integrity and excellence in performing each task we undertake.
You are nearing the end of a freelance project designing a website for a small startup company, and you realize you still have placeholder images on a few pages. The client requested that you use specific images and agreed to send them weeks ago. You follow up with the client and receive the pictures later that day, but the file names suggest that they are screenshots. You ask your client about the origin of the images, and he confirms that they are screenshots taken from a stock photography website. You explain that using the images in your design would result in copyright infringement and offer to track down the images so your client can purchase the rights. He maintains that he has never paid for such generic stock photography and none of the designers he has worked with in the past ever had an issue.
These six scenarios represent common challenges that many technical communicators face on a daily basis. How would you respond? When we encounter similar situations in our own work, it is important for each of us to take a moment and use our expertise to carefully and thoughtfully consider all possible outcomes and repercussions, especially under a tight deadline.
For professionals in our field, STC’s ethical principles provide a framework for making informed decisions that balance stakeholder needs, business requirements, and the public good. Because the scenarios we have described above are commonplace in our profession, it is our hope that by preemptively thinking through possible responses, you will be empowered to make more informed ethical decisions when the situation demands.
KELSEY LOFTIN is a technical writer at Cisco Systems where she works with engineers and product marketers to create technical marketing documents and design internal sales enablement websites. Her work is currently focused on IoE, IoT, and big data analytics.
MYLES CRYER is a communications manager for Capgemini, a technology consulting company. He creates, maintains, and executes account-wide communication plans and serves as the communication SME for the account.
