The golden rules of business ethics are the pillars that hold the success of every vibrant and successful business. You cannot make any reasonable headway in business if you do not appreciate the importance of business ethics. In fact, business ethics is the tonic that adds flavour to the overall corporate image of modern businesses.
In this article are the views of business leaders on what makes business ethics robust and indispensable as far as standing out amongst the crowd of business competition is concerned. According to the twenty six business leaders interviewed, below are the golden rule of business ethics.
FIVE PILLARS OF BUSINESS ETHICS | INGREDIENTS OF ETHICAL BUSINESS DEALINGS
1. TRANSPARENCY: transparency is the foundation upon which other features of business ethics can be built on. People will always suspect that you are harbouring doggy dealings when you are not transparent enough. By transparency, I don’t mean letting your business loose for competitors to prey on. In fact, securing your business secrets and trade information is a sound ethical way of doing business. What transparency in this context is referring to is a company’s ability to disclose adherence to regulatory and legislative requirements with proof.
2. COMMITMENT: the general public by nature disregards any entity that does not stand by its words. Doing business in an ethical manner can be daunting and confusing if there is no committed contingency plan in place. Contingency plan is an important ingredient of strategic management and strategic management accounting has gradually moved to. A company that is committed to good cause like making the environment greener can never go wrong as far as business ethics is concerned. This explains why lots of attention has recently been drawn to responsible and green investment.
3. IMPLEMENTATION: in businesses, it is not enough to just have procedures, rules and policies in place. The best sets of ways of doing business will translate into nothing if not implemented. Managers have got to learn that implementation of policies is crucial for them to effectively carryout their management functions. The investment that we strive to grow in generally acceptable way will vanish if that nitty-gritty of good business ethics is not enforced in the day-to-day dealings of a business.
4. STAFF TRAINING: Your staffs are the most important asset that drives every other asset you have in your organization- even though this is not shown in the assets register or statement of financial position otherwise known as the balance sheet. Without proper, relevant and adequate training, a company’s objective of operating in an ethical framework will be useless. The importance of investing in the human resource of a going concern used to be usually realised in the medium and long term. That era when a business will have to wait that long before reaping from the fruit of its labour is gone, human capital development benefits are now reaped in short, medium and long run. Companies that deploy and train their employees on the use of cloud accounting starts reaping from the investment immediately both in the form of contributing towards building greener environment and saving costs for example.
5. USE OF GREEN EQUIPMENT: a major component of robust business ethics is to actively seek ways to minimise the emission of dangerous substances into the atmosphere. The last golden rule of business ethics that was identified by those interviewed before writing this article is that corporations have to use equipment that has less potential of causing harm to the environment.
The golden rules of business ethics that are listed in this article are by no means exhaustive in terms of what needs to be done to put our business in a better competitive position, they are however the key to letting your impact as a business be felt both in your local community and beyond. If you can take good care of the areas identified in this blog post, the overall outlook of your company’s public image and brand would be seen from positive perspective.
Source: accountantnextdoor
