ISHN recently interviewed Mark Katchen, MBA, MS, CIH, founder and CEO of The Phylmar Group, on the ethical consequences of EHS budget cuts and low levels of trust and engagement in organization. Mark is co-author of a new book, "Ethical Decision-Making in Occupational and Environmental Health and Safety."

Are budget and staff reductions, increased workloads, and low trust, engagement and job satisfaction damaging EHS ethics?

Yes — but not in the simplistic sense of causing misconduct. These conditions increase ethical strain.

When staffing is reduced and workloads increase, Occupational and Environmental Health and Safety (OEHS) professionals face more frequent tradeoffs: depth of hazard analysis versus speed, thorough documentation versus production pressure, and long-term prevention versus short-term cost containment.

Low trust environments amplify this pressure. When only 19% of employees strongly trust leadership (per Gallup), ethical tension intensifies because professionals may feel isolated when raising concerns.

Ethical erosion in OEHS rarely stems from bad intent. It more often emerges from normalization of deviance, incremental compromise, and ambiguity about professional obligations. Budget contraction does not automatically erode ethics, but it increases both the frequency and intensity of ethical decision points.

How can professionals use ethics to improve workplace cultures, trust and engagement levels when senior leadership is causing the problems?

OEHS professionals are often mid-level leaders. They may not control budgets or strategy, but they control process integrity.

Ethics strengthens culture in three ways:

1. First, transparency of reasoning. When OEHS professionals explain not only what decision was made but why, trust increases. Structured reasoning reduces perceptions of arbitrariness.
2. Second, consistency under pressure. When OEHS leaders apply the same standards regardless of production demands, they model principled decision-making. Predictability builds credibility.
3. Third, professional identity over organizational convenience. OEHS professionals are bound by professional codes. When they operate from those standards, they reinforce that health and safety decisions are not merely managerial preferences.

Even when senior leadership contributes to distrust, ethical clarity at the operational level can stabilize local culture. Engagement improves when employees believe decisions affecting their health and safety are principled and defensible.

Can artificial intelligence be used ethically to improve cultures, trust, engagement and job satisfaction? Or are these socio-emotional issues beyond the capabilities of AI?

AI can improve efficiency, pattern recognition, and administrative burden. It cannot replace moral judgment or relational trust.

Ethical use of AI in OEHS requires transparency about how it is being used, human oversight, clear accountability, and avoidance of surveillance creep.

AI may help identify trends in incident data or flag emerging risks. That can indirectly improve trust if workers see hazards addressed proactively. However, engagement and culture are fundamentally relational. Trust arises from fairness, consistency, and integrity — qualities exercised by people, not algorithms.

Additional perspective

The Gallup polling data suggests not only a morale issue but a legitimacy challenge. When trust in leadership declines and middle managers are disengaged, ethical strain increases across the organization.

In that environment, OEHS professionals face a pivotal choice: operate narrowly as compliance technicians or operate as professionals exercising independent ethical judgment. The future credibility of the field may depend on which path is chosen.

Get a copy of Mark Katchen's book here.