Business Ethics: how to encourage ethical behaviour from employees

Figures show that more and more companies are now reporting their ethical performance and it’s clear, I think, that companies now have to address the issue of ensuring ethical behaviour amongst their staff. The question is of course – how?

To begin with, awareness is key.  And in order to promote awareness for ethics, the company needs to put ethics high on the training and staff development agenda. The HR department, say, can sponsor some workshops or seminars on business ethics, or even invite some external experts for this purpose. 

Once these procedures are in place, the company then needs to spell out an official code of ethical practice and ensure that all employees have access to it and can understand it easily.  The company then needs to implement an effective and anonymous system of reporting any breaches of this code. Some companies even benchmark their ethical practices against those of industry leaders and see how they’re doing.

I suppose it’s also vital that companies ensure that their senior managers set a good example, ‘walk and talk’ so to speak. If they don’t behave ethically why should staff?

All in all, whatever measures a company adopts, it needs to make staff understand why ethics is important not just to the company but also to themselves as well.