SUMMARY ✎
This toolkit is intended to guide you in your role as business owner, chief executive or manager seeking to protect your business against ethical lapses and in the journey to make your ethical values explicit. It suggests a simple, affordable approach to design an ethics framework and it is intended to be particularly useful to small and medium sized businesses, start-ups and growth companies.
It will help you to explicitly encourage your employees to consider the implications that ethical values have in their practical decision-making process and training them to include ethical considerations into their daily work. This will help to make sure that your core values are embedded throughout your organisation. Moreover, it will reinforce trust among your staff that everyone in the organisation will ‘do the right thing’, making clear what standards of behaviour are expected.
It draws on over 30 years of IBE experience working with a network of Supporter organisations and it is enhanced by a number of tools and research pieces that provide in-depth guidance on different elements of an ethics programme. It is designed to be useful for organisations operating in any sector worldwide.
Why is it useful?
Protect your business - This Toolkit will help you to promote trust in your business, engage with your colleagues and safeguard your reputation.
PROMOTE TRUST
Become a trusted supplier and enhance business opportunities with other organisations.
Meet the ethical standards set out in the ethical due diligence processes adopted by many organisations and prove to your partners and clients that you share the same ethical values.
DRIVE ENGAGEMENT
Engage with employees and support growth and culture.
Engage with your workforce and make sure that the founding values are upheld as the company grows, attracting the right talents, and the relations with your staff evolve.
SAFEGUARD YOUR REPUTATION
Strengthen your reputation both locally and internationally.
Enhance your company’s reputation and trustworthiness, especially when approaching new business opportunities or international partners with whom the company might not have personal relations.
The simple, fundamental steps outlined in this toolkit will help to set up the ethical framework for your company without requiring significant resources and bureaucracy.
Build the framework | Build an ethics framework, which includes an assessment of your culture and the main tools you can put into practice
Consider the issues | Consider the main ethical issues that might arise for your business.
Write a code | Write a brief code of ethics.
Discuss with the team | Discuss the application of your core values to some real-life ethical dilemmas with your team.
Additional policies | Write any additional policies you might need.
Recruit partners and employees | Recruit business partners, suppliers and employees who share similar ethical standards as you
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------