第三期2/5

As the government has been slow to respond to the increasing importance of ethics, companies have been forced to address the subject themselves and re-align their own management policies accordingly. These policies will determine how a company conducts all aspects of its business, from dealing with clients to reporting to shareholders. Then, I shall provide you a know-how pack of how to perform ethically. 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 behavior amongst their staff. To begin with, awareness is the key. The company needs to set 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. Once these procedures are in place, the company can then benchmark its ethical practice against those of industry leaders and see how it's doing. I think it's also vital that companies ensure that their senior managers set a good example, "walk the talk", so to speak. If they don't behave ethically why should the staff? And finally, the company needs to put ethics high on the training and staff development agenda. It needs to make staff understand why ethics is important not just to the company but also to them as well.