A better workplace requires leaders to model behavior I every aspect of their role.
In your career the ability to demonstrate leadership with a sound ethical basis is essential to your success for any role.
Ethical behavior is characterized by honesty, fairness, and equity in interpersonal, professional and academic relations. It respects the dignity, diversity and rights individuals and groups of people.
Promoting ethics in the workplace creates a positive culture for managers and employees as well as a successful business.
In a research conducted by The Society for Human Resource Management showed that stock price growth of the 100 firms with the most ethical cultures outperformed stock market and peer indices by almost 300% based on the most widely used measure of ethical workplace culture.
Businesses with strong work ethics add value to the organization ad support an environment where employees feel safe and valued.
Misconduct by employees’ and organizations can include anything from conflicts of interest to violations of company policies to falsifying time reports to bribery and illegal political gifts.
There is no company or organization that is free from ethics and compliance challenges. A survey done recently shows that more than 40 % of workers said they had observed on the job misconduct that violated their employers’ standards or rules.
Promoting workplace ethics by leaders and talent development consultants of any organization would be easy if they;
Be a role model and visible-this is important because employees look at top managers to understand what behavior is acceptable. Seniors management sets the tone for ethics in the workplace.
Communicate ethical expectations-set code of ethics and state the primary values and the ethical rules that employees are expected to follow. It is worthless if leaders are not able to moderate ethical behaviors.
Offer ethical training-seminars and workshops and similar programs should be set to promote ethics in the workplace. Trainings reinforces the organizations standards of conduct, to clarify what practices are and not permissible, and to address possible ethical dilemmas.
Visibly reward ethical acts and punish unethical ones-performance appraisal of managers should include evaluations of how actions measure up against the organization code of ethics.
Provide protective mechanism-the organization needs to provide formal mechanisms that allow employees to discuss ethical dilemmas and report unethical behavior without fear of reprimand.