"WAYS TO IMPROVE AN ORGANIZATION'S ETHICAL CLIMATE..."

Even businesses with a strong ethical culture may find employee attitudes,  behaviors and patterns of decision-making that could be improved. One key to changing employee attitudes and behaviors is to be the best example yourself, since employees need to see how well you practice the expectations set forth in your code of ethics. Beyond that, there are a number of measures you can take to improve your organization's ethical climate. 

1. Empowerment of Employees:- One way to improve the ethical climate of your organization is to give employees more power over their work. If employees have an ethical code and more control over their work outcomes, they are likely to justify your trust in them to make the right decision. Empowerment also can produce better results from employees, such as more creative solutions to business problems, when implemented effectively. Give employees a reason to act more ethically and to be more innovative , such as to keep their autonomy over their work – and you will also increase your company's efficiency.

2. Communication Policies and Procedures:- Improve your communication policies and procedures so that information will flow more smoothly and frequently between employees and managers. For example, assign a manager, HR specialist team to create a series of training scenarios that teach employees the right thing to do in common situations faced in your company. These scenarios will help managers communicate the expected ethical behaviors more clearly. In addition, make it easy for employees to report unethical behavior by contracting with an outside service to offer a toll-free reporting hotline, and make sure any allegations are investigated promptly.

3. Discipline and Consequences:- You can't expect all employees to comply with the ethics policy without some kind of discipline. Enforce your consequences for violations of the ethics policy evenly, regardless of the offender's high or low status. If you don't have the time to do this, delegate the job to a manager or HR director. Be sure to maintain careful documentation of employee violations in case you get sued over disciplining or terminating an employee for an ethical violation.

4. Changing Bad Patterns:-  As you look at employee behaviors and enforce your ethics policy, you might see patterns of unethical behavior. This might indicate that some rules and procedures need to be changed in the organization, even it affects ways of doing things that save time or money or increase profits. From a business standpoint, the short-term losses should be outweighed by the resulting improvement in the long-term reputation of your business.