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An ethical culture is formed and maintained by the people in the organization. Selecting directors, managers, and employees for the organization is a key element in creating and advancing the importance of values and ethical principles. Ethics is not just a set of company values on a plaque. Rather, ethics is part of the organization’s day to day activities and must be considered when recruiting, hiring, training, and promoting every individual.

Examples

Internal recruiting methods

Filling openings internally may motivate employees to stay and grow in the organization rather than pursuing career opportunities elsewhere. Internal…

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Truth in hiring

What message is being sent by the recruitment tactics you use? For instance, is it okay to exaggerate claims about…

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Practical Guidance

Welcoming Workers Back

How to ethically re-hire employees after lay-offs and furloughs Photo by Tim Douglas from Pexels With the COVID-19 pandemic showing signs of retreat as vaccination efforts expand, intact businesses look to the future. Many companies coped with the pandemic economy by laying off or furloughing employees. As business picks up, what is the best way to bring back workers? Once a business knows that it needs more staff, it should proceed with care to serve both the needs of the business and fairness toward its past employees. 1. Collect information Determine and document how many people you will need and in what roles.…

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The role of ethics in the hiring process

Keeping ethics top of mind when you hire helps to create a team that lives up to your company’s high ethics expectations. No matter how much you communicate with your employees about the importance of ethics, or how strong your Code of Ethics might be, it is critical to hire people who respect and uphold your ethics standards. Unfortunately, hiring ethical employees isn’t as simple as running background checks on all new hires, which would only turn up past public records or criminal activity. However, there are a few other ways you can try to really gauge job applicants’ character.…

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Putting ethics up front

Talking about ethics early and often is key to establishing a culture of integrity at your company. Every company has some sort of on-boarding process for new employees, whether in formalized sessions or more relaxed introductions. New employees have to learn about key colleagues, the management chain, clients, rules and regulations, new technology and systems…the process can be daunting. In that shuffle, particularly at smaller companies who may not have much excess staff time for on-boarding, it can be easy to leave ethics by the wayside. However, data from the World’s Most Ethical Companies® makes it clear that putting ethics…

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Finding ethical business partners

The wrong vendor or business partner can harm your business and reputation. Here’s how to find the right ones. To paraphrase John Donne, no business is an island. Every enterprise, from a self-employed consultant who works from home to a company with a few hundred employees, requires the services of other third-party businesses in order to meet their customers’ needs. Particularly for small businesses focused on operating in an ethical way, these third-party partnerships provide a certain amount of risk. After all, you exert a considerable amount of control over your own employees’ actions and the way you do business.…

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Why organizations need more star followers and less yes people

"I am reminded how hollow the label of leadership sometimes is and how heroic followership can be." - Warren Bennis Steve Nguyen, Ph.D. (May 1, 2018) Many of us miss a key point about the importance of followership. Indeed, most people hold a negative view of followership (Kelley, 2008). They can’t imagine anything good or positive that might come from the role of a follower. However, conversations about leadership must include followership “because leaders neither exist nor act in a vacuum without followers” (Kelley, 2008, p. 5). To me, there can be no leader if there are no followers, and…

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