Ethical decision making is an effort that must be taken by employees of all levels – at their free will! Learn more about what an ethical decision making process is, and how it can benefit your workplace.
An important topic in ethics training involves ethical decision making – the process that all employees must practice, that first involves the individual’s recognition or diagnosis of a potentially damaging ethical or moral issue in the workplace, and the proper course of action that he or she must take as a result.
The importance of this topic lies in the fact that employees must sometimes observe and react quickly, and their success in doing so upholds the integrity of the company. Ethical decision making is involved in a myriad of occurrences that range from accurately reporting expenses, avoiding the fulfillment of personal benefits and interests that utilize company property or take place during work hours, understanding and preventing workplace harassment, accepting gifts and gratuities and many other situations.
A proper ethical decision-making portion of an ethics training program outlines such ethical scenarios, while addressing their consequences with the usage of real-life examples. The goal is to decrease employee uncertainty in what is ethical or unethical. Employees are to be taught the process involved in ethical decision making:
Recognizing unethical practices based on the code of conduct: The employee can determine if a workplace practice is considered unethical by thoroughly learning about their company’s code of conduct, and passing judgment based upon the code (which is taught through the course of the corporate ethics training process).
Recognizing unethical practices based no common sense: Many “common sense” factors are taught in ethics training programs: employees are not allowed to use company property, insider information or time for their own personal gain, theft and sexual harassment is prohibited, all expenses must be backed up with receipts, etc.
Throughout the course of ethics training, employees are taught to keep themselves, their company, and the investors in mind as adverse practices have negative effects on all three of these team players. As an added venue of certainty, the company may supply an anonymous ethics or human resources tip line that employees can use to report unethical practices, or clear up uncertainties.
By combining the “common sense” factors with the corporate code of conduct, employees will fully understand how their company defines an ethical workplace.
Tags: Ethics Training
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