Ethical Parameter
Running a business requires adequate consideration to a number of issues outside the traditional scope of making money, of which ethics is most certainly one. As our business grows and becomes more significant, we impact on the lives and circumstances of people in ways we can only imagine - through bringing jobs, creating wealth and inspiring others to grow their businesses. An important part of engaging in this process is understanding your business ethics, which if not up to scratch can leave you with a bad reputation and can even ruin your business, not to mention alienating employees, suppliers and the local community.
Ethics is something of a subjective topic, but it is nevertheless of immense importance across all areas of business. From the way in which sales and marketing is handled through to product development and customer service, and even to some extent finance, ethics has a significant role to play in ensuring business success and ultimately living up to the corporate social responsibility. Thus adopting a ethics-specific approach to doing business is critical towards ensuring a legitimate business model with long term potential.
Business ethics is especially important in dealing with customers. Maintaining integrity in the customer facing side of your business is crucial to building client relationships, to assisting the overall branding efforts. Likewise, it's an important step in minimising returns and protecting business goodwill, which will have a tangible effect on the success or otherwise of your business.
Ethics wise, it's also important to consider how you deal with customer issues and customer service. While some businesses are prepared to sacrifice customer service for pound signs, there is not only a sensible business reason for providing adequate support but also strong ethics and moral reasons for providing help and assistance to your customer base.
On the administrative and strategic side of your business, it's also important to adopt an ethical approach which takes account of your various responsibilities as a business - to shareholders, employees and the community at large. Embracing these concepts of ethics as part of the way you do business is vital to ensuring your run an honest, successful business with the potential to grow and develop over time, and is one way of ensuring that you develop relationships across all aspects of your business that are conducive to success and profitability over the long term.
Ethics is no doubt an important business subject for any entrepreneur to study, but it also has a wider application throughout organisations. One man's concept of what is ethical and for the best may be completely different from another man's concept, and so it's important to establish a collective set of ethics that represent the entire organisation rather than just adopting a piecemeal approach. This can be installed through training, through creating business policies and even through careful selection at the HR stage, although it's important that there are also enforcement mechanisms within the business concerned, and that ethics remain a forefront consideration in day-to-day trade to ensure a unified, morally sound approach to doing business.
Industry Wide Ethical Issues
Following is a list of industry wide ethical issues. The problem with these is that they are not only routine and frequent, but they are also more widespread, i.e. throughout the whole industry rather than being confined to a particular business.
Here are some company specific ethical issues. These should be dealt with pretty strictly as to serve an example to the rest.
Ethics is something of a subjective topic, but it is nevertheless of immense importance across all areas of business. From the way in which sales and marketing is handled through to product development and customer service, and even to some extent finance, ethics has a significant role to play in ensuring business success and ultimately living up to the corporate social responsibility. Thus adopting a ethics-specific approach to doing business is critical towards ensuring a legitimate business model with long term potential.
Business ethics is especially important in dealing with customers. Maintaining integrity in the customer facing side of your business is crucial to building client relationships, to assisting the overall branding efforts. Likewise, it's an important step in minimising returns and protecting business goodwill, which will have a tangible effect on the success or otherwise of your business.
Ethics wise, it's also important to consider how you deal with customer issues and customer service. While some businesses are prepared to sacrifice customer service for pound signs, there is not only a sensible business reason for providing adequate support but also strong ethics and moral reasons for providing help and assistance to your customer base.
On the administrative and strategic side of your business, it's also important to adopt an ethical approach which takes account of your various responsibilities as a business - to shareholders, employees and the community at large. Embracing these concepts of ethics as part of the way you do business is vital to ensuring your run an honest, successful business with the potential to grow and develop over time, and is one way of ensuring that you develop relationships across all aspects of your business that are conducive to success and profitability over the long term.
Ethics is no doubt an important business subject for any entrepreneur to study, but it also has a wider application throughout organisations. One man's concept of what is ethical and for the best may be completely different from another man's concept, and so it's important to establish a collective set of ethics that represent the entire organisation rather than just adopting a piecemeal approach. This can be installed through training, through creating business policies and even through careful selection at the HR stage, although it's important that there are also enforcement mechanisms within the business concerned, and that ethics remain a forefront consideration in day-to-day trade to ensure a unified, morally sound approach to doing business.
Industry Wide Ethical Issues
Following is a list of industry wide ethical issues. The problem with these is that they are not only routine and frequent, but they are also more widespread, i.e. throughout the whole industry rather than being confined to a particular business.
- Bribing powerful officials in order to get bids and tenders accepted and bribing competitor employees to get informational leaks is a serious ethical issue in business. In fact, it is a crime that is legally punishable in most countries today.
- Labor related issues like gender discrimination at workplace, employee harassment, minority community participation, working conditions and child labor are also some general ethical issues.
- Business practices like sourcing of materials, quality of inputs in production, compromising on certain aspects like product quality, safety, etc. and deception in packaging, quantity or size also fall in the purview of business ethics.
- Some industries consciously omit the details of the side effects of the usage of their products from the product packaging while some indulge in controversial practices like animal testing and these too are some of the ethical issues in businesses.
- Forcing labor to work at below minimum wages, sweatshop work conditions, violation of worker rights and not complying with health, safety and environmental standards are some common current ethical issues.
Here are some company specific ethical issues. These should be dealt with pretty strictly as to serve an example to the rest.
- Showing honesty, integrity and openness in consumer relationships, addressing warranty and guarantee claims in an open and transparent manner and involving the company in some kind of social welfare causes is an ethical business practice that many are yet to follow.
- Whether to accept moral responsibility of on-site mishaps, spills, leaks and disasters and whether to make product recalls if certain harmful information about them comes to light, are ethical issues that all businesses must be prepared for.
- Unethical business practices like dumping good at loss making prices just to earn market shares or to oust a new competitor from business, colluding with competitors to fix higher prices, using high pressure selling tactics, using deceptive advertising, etc. are also some things that need to be looked at.
- Some stronger ethical issues are related to practices that are not easily detected, like releasing products that have built-in obsolescence (to generate further demand for future products) and indulging in accounting manipulations to generate secret reserves or to show higher or lower profits as per convenience.