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Managing Ethics in the Workplace

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Managing Ethics in the Workplace
Managing workplace ethics promotes shared values that result in better cohesion of the workforce, and play a crucial role in the success of any organization
Workplace ethics are the application of morality, or concepts such as good and bad, right and wrong, justice and virtue to all activities of the business. It closely relates to corporate social responsibility, but is much wider in scope.
The scope of business ethics lies in two dimensions:
1. Workplace behavior ethics, or the illegal and questionable practices of individual managers, such as wrongful use of resources, mismanagement of contracts and agreements for personal gain, conflict of interests, and the like.
2. Business ethics issues, such as ethical dilemmas when making decisions, dealing with stakeholders, and the like.
The primary requirement for managing ethics in the workplace is an understanding that workplace ethics is a continuous and on-going process ingrained to management practices, and not a deliverable defined project. It influences the way the organization functions, and remains independent of profits or product range.

• Ethics Policy
Irrespective of the dimension of business ethics, the basic requirement for managing ethics in the workplace is to have a strong ethics policy in place that makes the company’s ethics policy transparent and objective. Such as, ethics policies need to highlight the organization’s underlying values, code of conduct for the workforce, do’s and dont’s when dealing with stakeholders, standards and procedures to prevent dishonesty, theft, and other acts of moral turpitude, and other aspects of preferred behavior. It also needs to prescribe a means to enforce such behavior and codify punishments for errant behavior.
The aim of a good ethics policy is to prevent moral dilemmas rather

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