Summary of business ethics chat
By Chris Baker and Nina F Collins
Improving organisational ethics
How can organisations best improve ethical standards? Do codes of ethics help? What other mechanisms need to be put in place?
We held our first tweetchat on 3 June 2011. It proved to be a lively one hour with contributions from staff, Institute members and other twitter users. Our take on the conversation is as follows:
Organisations have to want to be ethical:
- Senior management have to get involved
- Show some desire and commitment – ‘tone at the top’
- Lead by example
Set what’s expected:
- Organisational values and living up to them
- Codes of ethics: expression of ethical culture not the cause; must be ‘personal’ to the organisation; expresses organisation’s values to external stakeholders as well as internal
Tell people it’s important – embed standards:
- Communication (internally and externally)
- Policies, procedures and most importantly behaviour to embed expressed values
- HIAs have a role in telling the board ethics is important
Find out how things are working and make changes:
- Through conversation and story-telling
- Internal audit could document and share stories
- Get feedback from staff, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders
- Get assurance
Ethics metrics and KPIs – are they useful or possible? The jury is still out on this one:
- The wrong measures could drive unethical behaviour
- Measures should focus on outcomes not processes but not easy to design such measures
- Measures could focus on unethical or ethical indicators
- Quantitative v qualitative