Business ethics is a never ending tale that covers the stories of business, the owners and the staff. Although there are stories of good ethics practiced between business owners and their employees, the amount of issues far overwhelms the good things. Here are some of the major issues in business ethics that entrepreneurs should look out for.
Discrimination and Harassment
Discrimination or harassment issues are not a light topic for organizations. For most companies, there are strict regulations to give their employees equal opportunities to shine at work. When it comes to handling the clients, organizations must treat them with utmost fairness. When either employees or clients are discriminated against or harassed due to age, gender, skin color and so on, these organizations are being unethical and can face legal issues . Of course this applies to discrimination issues between employees or employee-client as well. Some of the ways that organizations can help to curb these issues are by having solid organization policies instead of relying on Human Resources, or even routinely observing employee relations to catch unethical acts.
Accounting Issues
As the old saying goes, money is the root of all evil. Most of the unethical things that are done in business organizations center around financial issues. One of the easiest ways for organizations to manipulate their accounts is by cooking up their financial statements. Among the many scandals revealing companies worldwide that did this happened back in 2001, in which an American energy company falsified their financial statements and their auditor, an accounting firm carelessly signed off those statements. When the inaccuracies were caught, both companies went out of business and the shareholders lost billions of dollars. That’s why organizations everywhere must manage their accounts and financial statements with a fine tooth comb, and have a dependable and honest accounting team to record those numbers correctly.
Privacy and Technology
With technology growing faster day by day, the question of privacy arises. With upgraded security programs in the tech that employers provide for their employees, they can monitor the activities whenever they want. This system allows the employers to catch the employees who are misusing the available technology for purposes other than work. While this move is good to ensure that productivity goes on efficiently, how much monitoring becomes too much? This is where privacy policies come handy, and both employer and employees must review and understand them properly.