Company X and Its Ethics

Company X Code of Ethics

Company X specifically adheres to the required standard ethical behavior and requires all of its workers to adhere to all of the ethical standards outlined in this employee handbook. Our company’s philosophy is to include our Code of Ethics and Corporate Practices, which would serve as a roadmap to good business conduct for all of our workers. The corporation wants all of its workers to uphold the highest ethical and integrity expectations in their behavior. This means that all workers must adhere to a simple code of ethical ethics that includes the following components.

Legal Compliance

Both workers are required to defend the legality of Company X. As such, employees are required to comply with all the safety, environmental, and fair dealing laws. The company expects all the employees to be responsible and ethical when dealing with the company’s finances, public image, partnerships, and products. In this regard, all the employees shall also follow the legal requirements and regulations set by both the local and national authority.

Protection of Company Property

Being an employee of our company, the firm entrusts you with most of its properties and transfers to you the responsibility to keep all the properties safe and properly used. For this reason, all the employees must treat the company’s property, whether intangible or tangible, with care and respect. In this regard, employees;

• Must respect all kinds of incorporeal property; which includes copyright, trademarks and other property such as reports and information. Employees should use such property only to complete their job duties.
• Must not misuse any form of company equipment or use it frivolously.

Tardiness and Absenteeism

All employees of our company should strictly follow their schedules. The company expects all the employees to be punctual when coming to work and leaving from work. The company will make exceptions for explained occasions that may prevent employees from following standard working days or hours (Valentine, et al., 2011).

Professionalism

Professionalism is a code that our company holds dearly. All employees must show professionalism and integrity in the workplace. In this regard, all employees should follow professional standards under the guideline of;

• Personal appearance;

It is mandatory for all employees to follow our professional appearance guidelines and our dress code.

• Job duties and authority

All employees should fulfill their duties with respect and integrity toward the community, stakeholders, and the customers.

• Corruption

Our company discourages employees from accepting gifts from partners or clients. The company prohibits bribes for the benefit of any internal or external party.

Ethics Training

Our company emphasizes on ethics training to ingrain company values, regulations and rules in the minds of our employees. The company’s ethics training program focuses not only on teaching morality but also assisting our employees in making the right decisions in their professional lives. The components of our company’s ethics training program include;

The frequency of training

Due to the ever-evolving workplace environment, Company X provides an Ethics Training session for all employees once every month. This is to remind our employees of their obligation to comply with all the ethical standards, and also to make employees familiar with any changes regarding ethical conduct. Every new employee of this company is also taken through the training before working for the company. The training sessions happen in turns with different employees of the company and take a duration of one hour per session.

Specific content

The Ethics Training program is based on strong ethics policy that all the employees have received and acknowledged. The specific content of the training includes issues such as the social media and how to properly use it at the workplace, maintaining confidential information, courses on sexual harassment and equal treatment for all employees, acceptance of gifts that may influence the conduct of an employee to favor the interest of certain internal or external parties. The training will also cover issues dealing with conflicts of interest.

Delivery of the Ethics Training

The top managers of the company will liaise with external professionals in ethical conduct to provide the training to the employees. The ethics program will be conducted within the company’s premises and the employees will attend allocated sessions with the professionals to undertake the training.

Employee Misconduct

Our company understands that responding to employee misconduct is a very stressful situation for the company’s Human Resource department. As such, the company has set out a consistent procedure monitoring and reporting employee misconduct to help the process go smoothly and help avoid further problems.

Monitoring employee misconduct

Measures and procedures to be used

Our company implements computer monitoring and call monitoring as techniques to ensure that employees are following standard operating procedures at work. Computer-monitoring technologies that the company uses include software programs that allow us to see both what is on the screen and stored in computer terminals and hard disks of all employees. Call monitoring techniques involve real-time listening to randomly selected phone conversations of employees or recording and listening to them later. Our company complies with the federal privacy laws by informing the callers that their conversations may be recorded for purposes of quality-control.

Types of misconduct

The main type of misconduct that the company will be looking for is conducting personal business at work. The company faces significant loss from the misuse of company resources by employees. By using the call-monitoring and computer-monitoring techniques, the company will detect most cases of ethical misconduct on the side of employees.

Conducting the monitoring

The monitoring will be done by the middle-level supervisors and the company’s management.

Reporting employee misconduct

The measures and procedures we will use to encourage the reporting of employee misconduct is setting an environment that allows the interaction of all employees and sets a sense of responsibility for all the employees. Our company provides ways for employees to report misconduct anonymously, implements an open-door policy within the management team, and creates a culture where the employees view reporting misconduct as a normal part of their job. In this way, the employees understand that one employee’s act of misconduct may represent the conduct of the entire workforce. As such, every employee will be obligated to ensure that his or her colleague behaves ethically.

An employee may report a co-worker who is violating a company policy informing the supervisor or the immediate manager about the misconduct. The company will protect the identity of the employee that reports the issue. Our company encourages the employees to report misconduct by setting a good example. The company promises to diligently and impartially deal with all reported cases of employee misconduct. In this way, the company is committed towards addressing and preventing any form of misconduct. As a company, we understand that the stronger our commitment and the more we support and encourage misconduct reporting, the greater the chance that our employees will follow our lead and report misconduct incidents at the workplace (Steele, et al., 2016).

Evaluating the Ethics Program

After the implementation of the ethics program, it will be the company’s responsibility to audit the program and determine its level of success in instilling ethical conduct among employees. In measuring the effectiveness of the ethics program, the company will use tools such as an analysis of the use of company resources to determine whether the employees have stopped using them for personal purposes. The company will also examine the customers’ feedback and opinions regarding the employees’ conduct to assess any level of improvement.

The reviews in the functionality of the ethics programs will be conducted after a period of every six months with the company’s managers and external experts on ethical conduct. In this regard, the conduct of every employee will be assessed to determine their compliance with the company’s ethical standards.

After the audit of the ethics program, the company will track the attainment of internal program objectives and determine the areas that need improvement. In regard to improvement, our company will focus on areas little ethics change even after the implementation of the program. In such circumstances, the company will apply special measures and techniques to deal with the ethical issues that need further improvement. For instance, in the subsequent ethical programs, the company could allocate more program resources or justify additional resources to better handle the ethical issues. Other than using the ethics program, the company will also diagnose other opportunities for improvement. In case of changes in the ethical standards of the company, it will be communicated through a company memorandum as well as personal communication media such as email. Such changes will also be emphasized in cases of company general meetings or in the ethics training sessions.

References

Steele, L. M., Mulhearn, T. J., Medeiros, K. E., Watts, L. L., Connelly, S., & Mumford, M. D. (2016). How do we know what works? A review and critique of current practices in ethics training evaluation. Accountability in research, 23(6), 319-350.

Valentine, S., Godkin, L., Fleischman, G. M., & Kidwell, R. (2011). Corporate ethical values, group creativity, job satisfaction and turnover intention: The impact of work context on work response. Journal of Business Ethics, 98(3), 353-372.