Best practices to promote ethics and fair treatment at the workplace
Ethics, fairness, and justice is an issue in most of human resource decisions. Managers usually hire one candidate or reject another and promote one or demote another how employees react to such choices. Whether they think that the decisions were unfair or unjust or they ignore these decisions, a company that follow the principles of justice and ethics are unbiased, impartial, fair, and equitable in how it does things. Many ethical decisions involve the questions of morality that are the highest accepted standards of behaviour. Because violating moral rules may lead someone to feel ashamed of remorseful. HR decisions are usually replete with ethical consequences determined by the managers. For example, a survey has conducted in which six out of the ten most noble severe work issues are related to HR management. These issues are employee record security, workplace safety, employee theft, comparable work, affirmative action, and employee privacy rights. Another survey shows that 54% of the employees have observed misconducting the organizational rules.
There is a need to understand the ethical dimensions, basics of ethics and fairness principles of the people-related decisions. Managers can do a lot to manipulate employee’s beliefs by carefully cultivating the leadership, culture, incentive system, and the right norms. A quick ethics test will organize by the company every year to evaluate the performance of the workforce. The questions asked are: whom will the decision affect? Is it a right action, or how they feel afterwards? These actions will help the managers to promote ethics within the realm of human resource management practices. Here are mentioned some methods that the manager should perform to encourage fair treatment and ethics in an organization.
Selection- to tune up an organization
Ethically speaking, the simplest way to tune up an organization is to hire more ethical people. The interviewer must start asking questions creating recruitment materials that emphasize ethics. Use tools such as background checks and honesty tests to screen out undesirables. The interviewer should ask behavioural problems such as what did you do about it? How you ever observed someone stretching the rules at work? After recruiting the specific individual, employers should invest considerable effort and time on showing the hired individuals to work ethically the right way to do the things.
Whistleblower policies should be applied to reduce unethical behaviour determined by any employee. A whistleblower is legal channels of procedural methods to report the incidents of unethical behaviour to the company ethics. In this way, employers should adhere to the ethics code.
Fairness screening process
Managers need to make sure that the screening process for interviewing the applicants should be fair. If the prospective interviewee perceives that the hiring process does not treat people fairly, they may assume that ethical behaviour in the organization is not essential. The managers must keep in mind the personal methods to promote fair treatment in the organization. The applicants tend to view the formal procedures such as the interview as just to the extent that it provides the opportunities to demonstrate competence and tests job-related criteria. In this way, applicants expect respect.
Managers should perform interpersonal treatments that reflect such things as the politeness of the person doing the accessing, dignity of the questions and the degree of two-way communication and take the evaluation feedback from the candidates to evaluate your performance. Proper disciplinary procedures are essential when an employee violates a rule. And this biased disciplinary procedure can prompt retaliatory employee mischief and encourage misbehaviour.
Ethics training- to resolve the problems.
Ethics training is essential for all practical purposes. Ethical practice usually includes showing employees how to use ethical frameworks such as code of conduct to resolve the problems, how to recognize ethical dilemmas, and how to use human resource activities such as disciplinary practices and interviews in ethical ways. Training need not be complicated as Lockheed Martin provides its employees with ‘what if’ ethical scenario that highlights how to analyze and deal with the conflict of interest situations.
The training of the employees should also emphasize the moral underpinnings of the company’s deep commitment to integrity and ethics. Managers may provide ethical training with the help of internet. Online ethical program software can keep track of how well the employees are doing in terms of maintaining ethical standards.
Performance appraisal, reward, and disciplinary systems
Research suggests that If the company does not deal swiftly with unethical behaviours, they often leave the company in significant risks. Conduction of the appraisals is essential. Practical experience and studies have confirmed that some managers ignore accuracy in performance appraisals and instead thought the process of encouraging employees to leave the company is easy. These things can send a more damaging signal about how fair and ethical the company is.
Send the signal that standards of the organizations should be clear; fairness is paramount; employees should understand the basics upon which managers are going to appraise them. They should work upon these principles as the employees know that behaviour is a function of its consequences. The manager needs to penalize unethical behaviour and reward ethical behaviour.
Personal methods for ensuring fair treatment
For most managers, the answer to ‘why treat employees fairly’ is specific. Fairness relates to a range of positive employee result, enhanced satisfaction with the organization, employee commitment, and more organizational citizenship behaviours. The CEO and managers of the company personally attest to the accuracy of their company’s financial statements, employee’s performance, and the fact that internal conflicts have controlled.
Managers should involve employees in decision-making processes. It ensures that everyone involved in the organization is actively participating in the increasing performance of the organization. In foresting the perceptions of the fairness opportunities, two-way communications are essential. Employees should listen carefully and ask questions. The successful organization established channels through which employees can air their concerns. So, every organization must organize FedEx survey Feedback Action Program that includes an anonymous survey that let employees show their feelings about the company and the managers.