It slowly becomes an influential factor towards how the public perceives your company. Based on this, your business can create a positive image and earn respect and adulation for what it does as well as gain a favorable market position, or it can create a negative image and lose out on customers.
Ethical practices will help you create a strong public image which can help your company tide over difficult times and withstand tough competition even in a slow economy. In fact, in a bad economy, people prefer to put their trust in companies they consider ethical. Hence, ethical business practices are crucial for building a good future for your company. Partnerships, joint ventures and mergers will be a breeze if people feel they can trust you. The only means to finding such trustworthy partners is for you to maintain a good professional and industrial reputation.
When your employees make note of the fact that your organization upholds ethical conduct, they will automatically make all their decisions based on these very same ethics. That will make you a happy and trusting businessman and will also augment accountability and transparency in the decision making process. Having a strong ethical background also works as a guide to employees when facing tough challenges. It will also prepare you to be able to empathize with your employees thereby boosting the validity of the code of conduct in your organization.
When employees have to worry about ethical concerns at work, it causes a distraction in their minds and that, in turn, results in a loss of productivity. This adds to your business costs. Such situations can grow if issues related to unethical behavior are not addressed and dealt with straightaway. This is the opposite of what ethics do.
Ethics involve doing good for the entire community. Perhaps the ethic that most people in westsern cultures are familiar with is the ethic not to kill. This ethic is so intrinsic to both Judaism and Christianity that it has been absorbed into all western legal structures. It's good to examine why murder has always been outlawed. It is because it destroys the spirit of trust and cooperation within the community, and without that spirit of trust and cooperation within the community, the community wouldn't survive.
This does not mean that murder and killing has been outlawed in every community. There are some communities where they have become essential to the survival of a particular type of fundamentalist community. For instance, the Koran states that anyone who does not believe in Allah should be killed. In Hinduism, if a child marries outside their religion, the parents kill them.
This ensures that everybody in those communities live in the same way and obey the same laws. It means there is little or no discord which is good for the long term survival of the community. The murders are not seen as crimes but as obedience to their god. Another example of an ethic might be not to cheat.
The point of testing is to find out how skilled someone is at something. This means that people who don't pass examinations don't have sufficient knowledge to do a particular job doctor, for example. So if they cheat, and then they become a doctor, they are endangering people's lives.
This is not good for the community. Ethics always have to do with the the actions that result in the greater good of the community. Unethical actions always result in eventual destruction. Morality is a little different. It generally has to do with sexual mores - although that meaning is now fading and people use ethics and morality interchangeably. It stands to reason that if one is self-interested, one will chose the path that is good for oneself and not for the greater good.
A customer enters a business and wants to buy a green towel. The green towel will compliment everything else in the household. The businessman, however, only has pink towels and red towels. He spends thirty minutes convincing the client that the red will look good in her house and garners the sale. The lady goes home and, pleased as punch, asks her husband what he thinks of the towel. So one lady is unhappy and one businessman is happy.
Ethics is what guides us to tell the truth, keep our promises, or help someone in need. There is a framework of ethics underlying our lives on a daily basis, helping us make decisions that create positive impacts and steering us away from unjust outcomes. Ethics guides us to make the world a better place through the choices we make.
Ethics in business is just as important as ethics in personal life. Business leaders have a unique role and a great responsibility in shaping the ethical culture of their businesses, and thereby influence their broader communities as well.
Business leaders may not set out to define the ethical culture of their businesses but they inevitably do. Here are a few key questions to consider to bring ethics into your business mindset:. Business leaders, and entrepreneurs especially, are under tremendous pressure and can face very significant ethical challenges.
Here are a few examples of how unethical decisions arise for entrepreneurs:. Social responsibility is the idea that an individual or organization has an obligation to act for the benefit of society at large.
Today, social responsibility has become an important part of culture at businesses of all sizes. TOMS Shoes is an excellent example of a business that prioritizes social responsibility.
TOMS was founded with the commitment to provide a new pair of shoes for a child in need for every pair of shoes purchased. The company has now expanded to support other causes such as safe water, mental health, and equality. Social responsibility can be practiced in big or small ways every day.
Businesses can volunteer with local organizations, donate funds to a chosen cause, sponsor a neighborhood group or sports team, and much more. Even planting flowers, applying a fresh coat of paint, or picking up trash in front of your store has a positive impact on the community surrounding your business.
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