adminrepresents a competitive advantage to enhance organisational performance.
In like manner, staff training in business ethics is meant to provide strategic mileage, equipping staff with the skills, knowledge and understanding to anticipate ethical challenges, recognise ethical dilemmas, and make ethically sound decisions.
Training in business ethics provides employees with the framework for thinking about ethical issues in the context of their unique jobs and work environments. Organisations have a responsibility to teach staff business ethics so that they recognise ethics risks in the workplace and deal with them accordingly.
The need for business ethics training in the country can no longer be overemphasised.
Ethics training provides an immediate solution to the array of unethical behaviours that have become common in business operations, and will bring about positive economic benefits in the long term.
Successful ethics change processes require unfreezing the status quo, changing to a new ethics state, and refreezing to make the ethics change permanent and in this regard training in business ethics becomes the cog upon which ethics change processes must be grounded.
Ethics training enables employees to identify ethical issues, and address them in order to meet set organisational goals and objectives.
Business ethics training will enhance employee ethics awareness, and will uncover ethical issues and concerns that relate to their needs as well as those of the organisation.
It helps employees recognise ethical matters, and be able to dialogue on ethical issues.
Through ethics training, employees are able to recognise issues of responsible business conduct, and have the confidence and courage to make the right decisions and act accordingly.
Ethics training enables employees to understand how business ethics relates to strategic issues in the organisation.
It enables employees to use good judgment in addressing issues of responsible business conduct.
Adequate time should be allocated to training in ethics, and training participation should be an element of performance evaluation.
Business ethics training should take place at all levels of the organisation. It should include shareholders, directors, management and employees, and it should match their different levels of responsibility.
Managers and supervisors need additional training to reflect their roles and responsibilities as the front men who interact daily with employees. They must fully appreciate their roles and responsibilities in nurturing an organisational culture in which employees can seek advice and report concerns without fear or favour.
Business ethics training reinforces an enterprise-wide sense of responsibility where issues such as customer service, quality management, fair dealing with suppliers and service providers, and proper relationships with all stakeholders become an integral element of the training programme.
Business ethics training should also be included in the orientation of the newly hired employee. It should be as interactive, realistic and relevant to day-to-day workplace activities as is possible.
Designing a business ethics training programme requires the same attention to objectives and outcomes, as does any training programme in organisations.
A business ethics training programme must consider the prevailing situation, identify skills gaps, consider resource availability, identify target audience, engage training specialists, and must carry out after-training evaluation.
The organisation should equally be able to project the expected behaviour change through the training programme.
Thus ethics training should include action planning and follow-up to enforce the skills learnt. The business ethics training programme should be regularly and constantly reviewed to ensure its effectiveness.
Organisational cultures and stakeholders’ expectations change over time, and so the training programme should reflect these changes.
Most importantly, management commitment to training in business ethics should be demonstrated and ethics training should be treated as an integral part of the organisation to ensure employees value it. It must convey management commitment to support employees to seek advice on ethical issues in the workplace and report concerns than remaining quiet.
Training in business ethics becomes effective when employees perceive that management fully supports it.
l Bradwell Mhonderwa is an Ethics Coach and Trainer with the Business Ethics Centre. Email: [email protected],or visit www.businessethicscentre.co.zw, or call 0772913875
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