They pursue creativity and innovation, looking for the best ways to deliver their goods and seek to constantly improve their performance, customer satisfaction and employee morale. Companies with high ethical standards recognize their responsibilities to their employees and customers and understand how the conduct of their leadership affects the business.
Companies have a responsibility to lead with the values and mission of the organization to make logical decisions that benefit everyone. Company leaders should implement ethical standards and model them to others by displaying the standards themselves.
An ethical company seeks to maintain and protect a positive reputation to build a motivating work culture, keep investors engaged and provide exceptional service to customers. Upholding a good reputation means engaging in conduct that uplifts the company. If any action is taken to undermine a company's reputation, leaders need to handle the situation appropriately utilizing other ethical standards such as transparency, accountability and responsibility. Ethical businesses accept responsibility for all decisions made as a company and admit their mistakes to all of those who may be affected by a misstep including shareholders, employees and the public.
In addition to taking accountability, they also accept any consequences that result and do so transparently. Read more: What Are Business Ethics? Definition, Importance and Tips. Ethical conduct in business provides benefits for both business owners and consumers, including:. A code of ethics enforces a set of regulations and rules with the intent to keep the company operating within the parameters of the law, which protects company leaders, employees and customers.
Some legal areas include environmental regulations, financial regulations and employment equity. Ethics in business help build positive and trusting relationships between companies and consumers. Yours will, too. Using well-designed ethics training activities to effectively train your staff in consistently choosing the correct, ethical response is your best, most proactive option. There are simply too many possibilities to be able to address them all with an applicable set of ethics training activities.
In that case, after a situation occurs, you should train your employees in making the best possible choice for such a scenario. What are some common ethically-challenging scenarios, and what ethics training activities would best address them?
Here are examples of two of the most common ethical dilemmas that employees face in their workplace:. Unfortunately, this a very common dilemma. You want to prepare your employees in advance to choose the right behavior before the decision ever has to be made.
How best to handle this dilemma that can come in a range of behaviors? It helps to devise some dilemmas so that some of the correct choices are fairly obvious while other correct choices are subtle and tricky. Have your employees sit in small groups and discuss the dilemmas and the range of possible behavior options. Finally, have them whittle down their options to the appropriate responses, making sure to guide them the entire time.
This sort of ethical dilemma is extremely tricky. Often, in such cases, decisions must be made quickly, and they must be the correct decision the first time around.
Your employees have to be prepared to give the correct response. Rita is the head manager of a bustling, on-campus fast food facility that serves several thousand students each day. Rita runs a tight, efficient ship and turns a hefty profit for the company.
She has one day-shift supervisor and one night-shift supervisor, who are student managers. Jennifer quickly backs out before Rita notices her. What should Jennifer do? This is where Workplace Ethics Training Activity 2 may help. The organization must protect those who come forward about their colleagues and superiors when they observe them committing unethical, illegal or immoral acts. Well-designed ethics training activities can help.
The training activity that best suits this brainstorming project is Workplace Ethics Training Activity 3. Ask them to share true situations not made up of ethical, moral or legal conflicts they may have found themselves in or may have observed.
This activity will reveal ethical dilemmas in your organization, many of which you will have no clue are occurring. You must have high-quality ethics training activities in place to prepare your employees to make the right choices at the right time.
Many of you may ask why we need ethics management programs when you already have policies and procedures in place that define behavioural standards. Ethics programs are designed to ensure that there is no deviation from the standards laid down and also to ensure that employees are fair and honest in their conduct to the organisation.
However in order for the ethics programs to be successful managerial support and role modelling is very important. In fact there is a whole body of research that proves that organisations are increasingly documenting their ethics programs to align behaviours within the organisation and also going ahead to develop systems for implementation of the same.
Implementation of ethics programs is a clear example of organisations being very clear in communicating what they expect of the employee relationships. Do your customers trust and believe in your company? Do you trust and believe your employees?
Do your employees trust and believe in you? Trust and transparency in conduct is ever more important in our information-heavy age, and ethics need to be clearly stated, flowing down from the highest executives.
All employees and clients get their cues from the highly-visible executives and owners, and if they are seen to push the limits of ethical behavior, they will as well. A corporate ethics policy is a cornerstone to providing employees and clients with concrete guidelines about what is and is not accepted in the workplace without the need for constant oversight from management.
It can also provide transparency in action and goodwill with customers who strive to find companies that they can trust. A good policy does more than just outline concepts of good behavior, it also communicates expectations and requirements, has buy-in from all levels of business from the board of directors down , and develops measurements to determine if ethics are being maintained and yielding the desired results.
Creating an ethics policy can be daunting, as evidenced by how popular the Ethics topic is on KnowledgeLeader. Companies without a clear set of values may find themselves at a disadvantage when developing ethics programs.
0コメント