This article aims to highlight the importance of ethics in workplaces from the prospect of a well-known big corporate organisation. Employees and their teamwork is the main root of success in any organisation. Workplace ethics helps to maintain work culture and employee engagement properly. Good ethics stand for a good business, while bad ethics can destroy an excellent organisation. Ethics help resolve issues in the business world and deal with deception and frauds, thus taking part in developing countries (Andrade et al. 2017). Business ethics can help to hold the organisation virtues such as equity, mortification, generosity, nobility, and cosmopolitanism.
Ethics mean moral principles of business law that steer an activity and makes a person's behaviour good, right and proper. Ethics link with integrity, respect, responsibility and values internal adjustment while relating goodness or badness of a good or bad deed. There are basically four types of ethics- Meta ethics, narrative ethics, applied ethics and normative ethics (Darwish et al. 2019). Business ethics means organisation principles, grade and company norms that maintain the proper and fair going of an organisation and must be pursued by employees and employers. It is a spacious area, and many factors and various affairs fall under its limitations.
Workplace or business ethics include honouring company rules, feasible interaction, professionalism, ability to take responsibilities, intelligent and efficient work and many more. Business ethics perform the adequate business policies and assure a particular level of belief between customers and organisation. It helps the organisation stay safe from legal issues as workplace ethics sincerely follow all legal laws and regulations (Ferrell et al. 2019). There are many factors that influence how a person judges a situation as being ethical or unethical. An organisation can get a number of advantages and a reasonable profit if they are conscious about business ethics and fully use them appropriately.
Nowadays, people are becoming worried about what is going on in an organisation in the name of competition, quality, profitability, and organisation growth. The stakeholders of organisation and the government are strengthening business ethics to avoid fraud and controversial issues. The organisation managers and employees cannot even put down the magnitude of workplace ethics as each year, a number of unethical cultures occur in various business organisations. Corporate traders and academic authorities are also worried about the increasing amount of unethical business practice in organisations (Holmberg-Wright et al. 2017). As a result of this, it is becoming much more important to follow the workplace ethics to avoid doing a misdeed to their employees and customers and remaining in tethering of law.
A business sets up a good relation and faith between the organisation and its consumers. Once a customer feels or realizes that the organisation cannot be trusted anymore, they will be fond of another organisation that is a competitor of a previous organisation. This situation will affect the previous organisation's profitability as well as its reputation. Some organisations use their business ethics as a marketing tool to gain an advantage in their profitability, goodwill and brand value (RemiÅ¡ovÃ¡ et al. 2019). Investors and shareholders find it suitable to engage their money in an organisation that follows standard business ethics. Following business or workplace ethics is also lucrative to its employees as they always admire a conscious employer and employees become more devoted towards their job.
“Human Right Act (1998)” - The workplace should be free of any kind of discrimination and diversity. Everyone must be employed based on ability and worth instead of sex, religion, colour, nationality, age, race and every quality must be preserved by laws.
Physical, verbal or mental harassment is strictly prohibited in the workplace, and employees' rights should be admired. The organisation can never use any underage or child labour as per law. Organisation must run by voluntary labours and not by forced, bonded or prison labour and any form of human trafficking are liable for punishment (Valentine et al. 2019). All the employees must receive an adequate salary and convenience as per law and organisation norms. Some local laws and regulation should determine working hours, and only wilful overtime is allowed with proper wage.
'Health and Safety Act (1974)' and “Asset Protection Act (2019)” - Use and ordination of alcoholic quenchers, drugs are forbidden except some commissioned events. The organisation will not allow any violence and carrying weapons in side or offside the office (Ferrell et al. 2019). All the electronic devices, data, and materials will be protected, and employees can use only the organisation's instruments inside the workplace.
From the above discussion and example, it can be inferred that business ethics plays a significant role in maintaining consumer belief, grade of organisation, consumer-organisation relationship. Facebook became more concerned about their business ethics after the fraud of security breaching and offered more safety and commitment by maintaining workplace ethics. Business ethics give assistance to respect its customer, deliver fairness, cares about the consumers. It treats its customer necessity as a priority, provides transparency, makes communication clear, maintains workplace variety, and respects consumer information and their privacy. Business ethics also give an outlet to report unethical behaviour in workplace. Governments of different countries are teaching an anthology of business ethics and asking organisations to follow it strictly.