Ethical Conundrum: Thinking Outside of the Box?

Once again I present to you, an Ethical conundrum! Please help.

I met up with another IT business owner recently, who told me this story, and honestly, I didn’t really know how I felt about it.

So today I'm going to tell you a story, and hopefully, you can help me decide if this is either a really clever way of doing business or perhaps it’s just plain wrong.

Genuinely, I don’t know how I feel about this, so please, drop me your comments and tell me what you think about this.

So one thing that many of us will do in our time, will be to tender for business.

That is, one company advertises that they need to find a new IT Provider, so they put it out to the public, wait for some quotes to roll in, and then pick 2 or 3 to run up against each other.

The tender goes out. Quotes come in. They get down to the final few.

And it turns out, that one of the final few won because what they did was just a little bit...

So this company had a few outsourced engineers which were employed by the old IT provider and based inside the offices of this client.

Just your typical outsourced position.

What happened though, was that one of the companies tendering for their IT has approached these 2 outsourced engineers and offered to employ them instead.

Now I don’t know the terms of what they were offered, but we can only assume it was along the lines of, we’ll offer you more money and more benefits to come work for us. BUT, you get to keep on doing the same job you’ve enjoyed doing so far.

To the client, there’s NO change. They still get the same 2 awesome engineers that they love.

To the engineers, they get perhaps more money, a better company to work for and maybe a few other perks, I don’t know.

Now perhaps there are other benefits here to the client that I haven’t covered. Maybe they get to pay a bit less, maybe they get some other benefits.

But because this IT company has essentially gone and poached these people, they then won the tender, which is something that nobody else tendering had thought of doing.

So I ask you today if you are reading this. Tell thee in the comments - what do you think of this? Is this ethical?

Your thoughts are greatly appreciated. Anyway, that’s all for this week!

Maybe in the next post we can reflect on your comments - either way! See ya.

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