by Brooke Smith | 29 February 2024 7:00 am
The key to successful building construction is the foundation—and ethics are a key part of that. One of the core values of the International Institute of Building Enclosure Consultants (IIBEC), as stated in our 2024–2026 Strategic Plan, is that our members be ethical, independent, objective, and unbiased in their practice. Ethics are paramount for our members and registrants, all of whom have been required to abide by the IIBEC Code of Ethics since its adoption in July 2001.
For more than 20 years, our building enclosure consultant members have dedicated themselves to the highest standards of professionalism, integrity, and competence by adhering to the standards contained in our code of ethics and the statements of ethical principles that guide their professional conduct and obligations.
In 2024, we look forward to building on recent efforts in ethics, including a session (now available for IIBEC members to view for free) from our last Building Enclosure Symposium. Such efforts are an integral part of our 2024–2026 Strategic Plan, which aims to boost ethics education for IIBEC members and, where needed, to enforce of the IIBEC Code of Ethics.
The code’s fundamental canons require IIBEC members to do the following:
Enforcement of the IIBEC Code of Ethics is administered through the IIBEC Ethics Committee, which maintains the code and oversees its application to IIBEC members. Since the code is essential to ensuring our members and registrants conduct themselves and their practice honestly and impartially, IIBEC has updated its Code of Ethics whenever needed. To date, the code has been updated three times: in 2006, in 2015, and, most recently, in September 2022, when the code was updated to express IIBEC’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. The updated code language specifies the following: IIBEC does not tolerate harassment, discrimination, racism, violence, retaliation, and other disrespectful or inappropriate behavior. IIBEC members and registrants are committed to diversity and inclusion and shall value and embrace diversity in the profession and participation in IIBEC programs and activities.
Real-world application
Since our Code of Ethics informs how our members carry out their building enclosure practice and duties, it is important to look beyond the code itself and discuss its real-world application.
To that end, last year we gathered a dozen building enclosure professionals—including a past president of IIBEC and current and previous IIBEC region directors—for a roundtable discussion about ethical issues they have faced in their practice and the importance of the IIBEC Code of Ethics in addressing those situations.
Asked about the instances where participants had to personally apply the IIBEC Code of Ethics, IIBEC Ethics Committee chair Matthew Durrett, a registered roof observer (RRO)—one of the seven credentials IIBEC offers—responded with the following:
“This is a conversation that comes up time and time again. Everybody has to work together to achieve an end goal. Good design without good product—that doesn’t get you anywhere. So, it’s vital we have good relationships across the board. You need to be able to maintain those relationships and have a manufacturer you can lean on when you need some assistance. You never want to engage in something that potentially can affect your judgment if something happens and something goes south. At the end of [the] day, right is right and wrong is wrong.”
But ethics is not just retrospective; it is future oriented. That is why we asked panelists about the implications of the budding use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the building enclosure industry.
IIBEC member Darbi Krumpos shared an instructive, cautionary tale about the younger workers in her office who worried about how AI could make them obsolete.
“Some of the young people came to me and said, ‘Look, this program can write your reports for you and can do what you do, and you’re going to be deleted by this new technology.’ So we took an assessment of a historic structure and limited it to just the roof, and then ChatGPT was instructed to do an assessment on the same roof. We identified all the areas where the computer-generated report did not dig into the depth and the detail that we provided in our own report. So, showing the comparison between the two different approaches to the 20-somethings in our office was a valuable lesson.”
Set apart
The engagement of IIBEC members in adhering to the Code of Ethics sets us apart in the building enclosure industry—a testament to impartiality, honesty, and integrity, and a way to ensure the structural soundness of today’s buildings—and the buildings of tomorrow. By strengthening the Code of Ethics when needed, IIBEC continues to model the best practices of the building enclosure industry. IIBEC takes pride in setting a high ethical bar for the rest of the industry, and we will never accept a lower standard.
Brian Pallasch, CAE, is executive vice-president and CEO of International Institute of Building Enclosure Consultants (IIBEC). He can be reached at bpallasch@iibc.org.
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