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Creating an Ethical Culture at Patagonia

Patagonia employs over 1000 people and designs outdoor apparel and gear for the quiet sports of climbing, fly fishing, surfing, snowboarding, and skiing, and trail running. Patagonia defends the environment with their apparel designs, which are simple, long-lasting, in addition to corporate tithing and adaptable. Synchilla, a fabric woven from recycled soda bottles, which is used in many items. The firm switched to organic cotton this spring.

Components that make up an ethical corporate culture

Creating the right culture inside an organization or firm is critical, knowing about ethics is one thing, but really creating the right culture is quite another. An organization’s rules are the ideas, values, norms, and attitudes that its leadership has codified into expectations, regulations, and procedures (Huhtala, 2021). They instruct individuals what they should do and how they should act and interact. These guidelines are often found in official publications such as, operations manual, the employee handbook, and statement of company principles. However, certain regulations may be “unwritten,” such as an expectation that staff place their dishes in the dishwasher or refrain from using emoticons in customer conversations.

Your corporate values are the ideas, beliefs, and principles that govern a corporation. They have an influence on both the workforce you provide and the relationships you build with your, shareholders, customers, and partners. Your corporate values are the DNA of your firm, and they enable you separate yourself from the competitors. That is why you cannot make any critical business judgments unless you keep them in mind.

Company core values are defined as the clearly articulated concepts concerning the organization’s vision, purpose, and ideals. As a result, everyone is united under a guiding principle to serve customers, employees, and the larger community. This may also be used to define business culture. Company’s hypotheses are things you expect to be true in order to establish a strategy, make choices, and plan. They are typically reported as a disclosure of uncertainty in business strategies and business cases.

Plan to create an ethical corporate culture

First, I will see the significant link between developing an ethical culture and developing a trusting society. Ethics is a collection of rules. An ethical culture is one that is devoted to following those ideals — and sometimes that quest leads an employee takes activities that others may not approve of (Koehn, 2022). Perhaps the employee discloses suspicions of wrongdoing; perhaps he or she refuses a lucrative business transaction due to bribes or collusion. So, from my client’s perspective of “creating an ethical culture,” numerous activities suddenly leap to the top of that list.

The ethical culture must go through four stages. Create special training materials based on these parameters. Create real-life circumstances that employees could face, with the resolution demonstrating how ethical behavior takes precedence above commercial success.

Improve their internal monitoring system to ensure whistleblower confidentiality. Someone who reports a complaint to a hotline or another method that bypasses his or her management is afraid of doing the right thing. He or she must believe that the firm will preserve their identity—that is, they must believe in the system. As a result, customers must verify that your internal monitoring system is reliable.

Examine the company’s incentive compensation to ensure that it motivates appropriate conduct. If the company has a rank-and-yank policy that fires the lowest achievers every quarter; or if individual incentives are heavily used, pitting employees against one another—policies like these might foster improper conduct, when commitment to ethics is thrown out the window (Smimou, 2020). The last step would be to create a set of clear ethical ideals for the firm, such as honesty, respect, and fairness. Discuss what those values must be with top executives and the board. Include them prominently in the Code of Practice.

To sustain the ethical culture, the organization will employ four strategies. Make a policy for standard employee monitoring. Second, follow country and state laws, and then educate staff realize the need of monitoring. Lastly Make use of a safe employee monitoring and performance tool.

Learning strategies to foster an ethical corporate culture

Create trusted connections. Employees are more likely to trust and speak openly with one another when they demonstrate acts of good faith. Such as, an employee who freely assists one of their colleagues with a project can establish a positive professional connection as well as a collaborative atmosphere in the future. Furthermore, trusting employees find it simpler to obtain assistance from peers and accept increased duties from their managers.

Increase employee collaboration. Any organization will have a much more difficult time achieving success if they do not work together. When workers work effectively together and make great contribution to their team, the entire team’s success can be accelerated. Operating in a highly collaborative manner can also drive individual employees to perform better in their roles.

Individual well-being should be promoted. Workplace ethics may benefit an employee’s personal life as well. Positive feelings and general peace of mind are fostered by well-intentioned decisions. Furthermore, workplace ethics may create both personal and professional relationships, which contributes to job happiness. Patagonia must achieve a Fashion Transparency Index score of at least 53-65 percent. The brand must disclose a full list of final-stage suppliers, as well as data on the outcomes of supplier checks, as well as data regarding forced labor, gender equality, and freedom of association.

Parameters for ethical decision-making in 21st-century multi-cultural business environments

Core values are shared. They are truthfulness, respect, accountability, justice, and compassion. In a values-based culture, these fundamental concepts will drive decision-making. The same dialectal; Personnel want an ethical dialect that allows them to talk easily and comfortably about sensitive and difficult-to-discuss matters. Effective ethical training programs offer the necessary common language. Two, top-level commitment; Without chief execs who live the walk, ethics training is pointless. Above and above all else, leaders who constantly reward people who would pick to do whatever is right assist to develop an ethical culture.

Moral bravery is defined by Kidder (2001) as ” the mental and spiritual qualities that permits one to face ethical quandaries and ethical wrongdoings firmly and courageously, without flinching or shrinking.” Ethics, lifestyle, and culture must become inextricably linked such that they cannot be separated. They constitute how individuals interact with one another in the family, the workplace, and across society.

Attending to only a few critical and simple measures to help build and preserve an ethical culture might be advocated and shared with all companies. These are some examples:

Concentrate on skill development and problem-solving. Establishments may do plenty to focus their energies on fostering moral qualities and problem-solving techniques (Silveira, 2021). Institutions must aid with step-by-step tactics for building good ethical decisions and conduct rather than just announcing what kinds of acts are expected or not, as well as methods for addressing ethical challenges or concerns.

Clear expectations regarding what is and is not acceptable. Every business has both implicit and explicit norms and recommendations for how to behave in their sceneries. This involves everything from wardrobe to expressed opinions and conduct toward colleagues, clients, and the general public. Reinforce the desired behavior and avoid reinforcing the undesirable behavior. This is a basic operant conditioning principle that any college student would learn about in their first psychology course. It is also a reality that has been passed down through generations. Reinforce the behavior if you want it to continue. If you want a behavior to stop, do not reward it.

Conclusion

These principles give an easy-to-remember and straightforward collection of guidelines that are idealistic in nature but provide a sharper emphasis on how to optimize ethical behaviors under varied corporate climates. With these fundamental ideas thoroughly understood, often utilized, and debated within organizational life, all employees of these organizations should be much more alert to how their educational and business environments might be more ethically centered.

References

Di Miceli da Silveira, A. (2021). Corporate governance and ethical culture: Do boards matter? Review of Managerial Science, 1-32.

Huhtala, M. (2021). Ethical Culture and Management. In Handbook on Management and Employment Practices (pp. 1-19). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Koehn, D. (2022). Ethical and Leadership Challenges by Organizational Culture Type. In Leadership and Business Ethics (pp. 183-199). Springer, Dordrecht.

Ryan, M. R. (2021). Business ethics as a form of practical reasoning: What philosophers can learn from Patagonia. Humanistic Management Journal6(1), 103-116.

Smimou, K. (2020). Corporate culture, ethical stimulus, and managerial momentum: Theory and evidence. Business Ethics: A European Review29(2), 360-387.

 

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