Ethics 4 Everyone Video

Rating ***** (3 out of 5 stars)

Initial Thoughts
I probably shouldn't even be evaluating CRM's Ethics 4 Everyone video because I recently finished writing my own Ethics Video called Moment of Truth. But with that bias in mind, it's probably valuable to understand why I wrote a new video about ethics when this one has been selling in the industry for a couple years already.

Ethics 4 Everyone is a pretty straight-forward ethics film. It's very professional with a legal/corporate sounding message that gives it a sense of authority and a trusted voice for dispensing truth about ethics to businesses. It's also fairly practical, too. It tries to reflect some typical ethical situations that could present themselves in the business world.

The Pros
As opposed to my video which clocks in at 26 minutes- Ethics 4 Everyone manages to fit it all into a 15 minute format. That can be a good thing for managers that are on a time crunch (or those who want to use it with a short training session).

Eric Harvey, co-author of the best-selling Walk the Talk book series hosts the show and he really looks like an ethical person. That goes a long way toward immediate credibility and gives it a voice of authority.

The video tries to make a distinction between people who have no regard for ethics and those who really want to do the right thing but mess up sometimes (like we all do). They do this pretty well by presenting some scenarios of truly uncaring people in contrast to the rest of us- people who are tempted to make a bad choice based on a gray area.

The Cons
This video attempts to make an emotional connection through the scenarios, but falls short because it's obviously compliance driven- not story driven. This means that viewers will probably consider the scenarios corny instead of actually relating to the characters and drawing parallels into their own work-life. For example, the picture above is from a scene where a guy gets caught throwing tons of office supplies into his briefcase and replies- "everyone else is doing it..." WHAT?

Another bad part is that this film tries to highlight EVERYTHING. In training films, it's a common practice to highlight a main point by showing a text version of what the person is saying. This works as a good accent when it's done right- but when you highlight every other word- the impact is lost. A learner has no idea what's important enough to remember or write down for notes if they see every word accented (like subtitles).

This leads to another problem- which was originally in the pro section... they try to shove TOO much into 15 minutes. It needs another 10 minutes to really cover every point or it needs to take out some of the material.

Also, on a production note, the editing is a little choppy. It begins with the opening sequence where (for diversity's sake) a bunch of different people say the same sentence, picking up where the last one left off. But it's not in natural beats or breaks so it seems a bit choppy and contrived. Also, the host (Harvey) does blue screen work AND audience work and when they cut back and forth between the two there are some hiccups (meaning that it'll pick up in the middle of a word or in the middle of a sentence).

Who Would Want It
The Ethics 4 Everyone Video is "check-off" training. This means that it's great for a company who doesn't really want to take the time or effort to help their employees make good, ethical choices but also needs to check a box saying that their people have viewed an ethics video.

The Bottom Line
Ethics films are generally for compliance use- but they're also supposed to make the view act differently or at least think about how their action effect others (hopefully). This video makes a fair attempt at both, but falls short.

Check it out here: Ethics 4 Everyone Video