ETHICAL PROGRAM CODE OF ETHICS

Ethical Program Code Of Ethics

Ethical Program Code Of Ethics

Introduction

Ethics commonly refer to the rules or principles that define right and wrong conduct. In the United States, many believe we are currently suffering from an ethics crisis (Reder 85). Behaviors that were once thought unacceptable -- lying, cheating, misrepresenting, and covering up mistakes -- have become in many people's eyes acceptable or necessary practices. Managers profit from illegal use of insider stock information, and members of Congress write hundreds of bad checks. Even college students seem to have become caught up in the wave where studies show significant increases in cheating on tests (Donaldson 1989). Concern over this perceived decline in ethical standards is being addressed by organizations, while companies rely on their Human Resource (HR) department to build an ethical culture.

Ethics and Business

Ethics in today's business has become as important as providing a quality product or delivering quality service. Customers have been changing over the years as to what they feel is important(Weaver Keble Trevino 1999). An old saying that still applies to day is “A customer does not have to like his banker, but he has to trust him” (National Federation, 2003). This saying punctuates that customers will not continue to do business with a company that does not conduct day to day operations in an ethical manner. Failure of a company to do so can have an exponential downward effect on its business. Word of bad business practices spreads much faster than word of ethical behavior. How important is it to properly implement and maintain an ethics program in your business?“Ethics is a set of standards judging right from wrong” (Williams 2000). Breaking it down to its most basic level, this means that a business must act fairly and honestly not only as a whole, but each individual must possess and use these standards. This applies on the individual level by each employee using their best discretion such as: billing hourly work, following up with customers in a timely manner, and treating every person with the respect that is expected from society. On the larger scale, businesses should exercise fair and honest competition, working within the boundaries of the law, and doing business without deception or misrepresentation. Most companies have a set of rules to follow called a Code of Ethics or Code of Conduct (Williams 2000).

Case: Development of Code of Ethics

The company faced some scandals, due to this reasen the company requires to improve the ethical culture I would like to relate a real challenge that I experienced recently in hopes that it may enlighten others who may be confronted with improving the ethical culture within their organization. It began when the organization I had recently joined had experienced recent ethical scandals and the board was looking to me to improve the ethical culture. Before I began the task of improving the ethical culture of our organization I seemed to be so distant from the very high profile corporate ethics issues of ...