Year: 2020

You should seek to promote flexibility in your organization. You can do this by encouraging your employees to find new ways of doing business that are better. You should also be brave enough to do away with policies that do not work, because there are advantages that come with promoting flexibility in your organization.

Enhanced Competitiveness

One of the problems with an organization that is rigid and mechanistic is that it cannot adapt. Whatever challenges that come along will strain the organization. Eventually, a challenge will come along that’s so massive that the organization may falter.

One of the factors that seriously alters the playing field is technology. When technology comes along that is disruptive, companies that initially had an advantage find themselves at a disadvantage. They need to figure out ways in which they can use the old technology, which will refine their former business practices so that they can then regain their competitive edge.

An organization that is flexible will respond to changes by evolving. The most flexible organization does not fight change; a flexible organization accepts change as an inevitable part of the business environment, so it learns to maximize its opportunities whenever change comes along.

Improved Efficiency

A flexible company will be willing to try new methods and processes, even when the old processes seem to work just fine. Flexibility in business means that you don’t live by the maxim, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Instead, a flexible company will look for ways to find something that works more efficiently than what you already have.

Let’s start with your company policy. As a flexible company, you should be willing to review and refine your corporate policies so that you will encourage innovation, so that you can then find more-efficient and more-effective methods. This is a key factor in how important it is to have flexibility in operations management.

As time progresses, this culture of constantly experimenting and improving your processes will mean that your company becomes more efficient, so that it can enjoy higher revenues and reduced costs.

Your Scheduling Becomes More Flexible

The most flexible organizations offer their employees a more diverse range of options. These organizations make it easier for their employees to lead personal lives that are more fulfilling, while also enabling the employees to meet their work commitments.

One factor that can help is to allow your employees to telecommute – or at least, to offer them a flexible work schedule. This would be a boon to your employees, since it would benefit those who have families or other responsibilities.

Another example of a flexible organization is that you could consider allowing job sharing, so that you could split one job among two employees, who each work part-time, rather than having one employee who works full-time. You will be allowing the two job-sharing employees to have more flexibility in their scheduling, thereby enabling them to become more productive.

When you accommodate your employees’ needs like this, you enable your employees to become more loyal to your company, so that it becomes easier for you to retain your best employees who might otherwise have left the company, had your company offered only a rigid schedule.

Better Team Building

When your management structure is flexible, you will get the most out of your workforce, depending on their individual talents. No two people are the same, so no two employees have exactly the same skill sets. A good manager knows how to bring people together who have differing talents and then to unite them under a single cause.

When you unite your team so that their skills complement each other, you have a flexible unit that can handle a diverse range of issues. They become able to take on any challenge that comes their way, and in so doing, they enable the organization to become more effective.

A manager who is too rigid won’t do this. He will try to force square pegs through round holes. putting his employees into roles where their abilities are not effective and their weaknesses are magnified. The result is that they will become less productive, thereby making the organization less productive as a result.

Better Continuity During Uncertainty

One of the characteristics of a flexible organization is that it is prepared for uncertainty. By having its workforce distributed among different places and working using different media, the organization is better able to handle uncertain conditions that would make it difficult for a centrally located organization to cope. Such things as storms, tornadoes, and other natural disasters make it difficult for rigid organizations to adapt and maintain continuity.

A flexible organization will also be able to deal with uncertainty in economic and technological environments. Such a company should have measures in place, in the event of changes in technology, regulation, or even the economy.

Your Environmental Impact Is Reduced

When you install flexible work schedules and you leverage the power of the internet to enable your employees to work remotely, you have fewer buildings to maintain. Your employees also have to do a lot less commuting to and from work, which means your organization’s carbon footprint will also be reduced.

Another thing about flexible organizations is that they use technology, which is electronic, so that they do not have much paperwork. They also reduce the amount of office supplies they use. This also reduces the carbon footprint of the organization, thereby making it more environmentally friendly.

Hiring Costs and Turnover Costs Are Reduced

Of course, when your organization is flexible, it will accommodate your employees’ needs and schedules, which means that they will have a healthier work-life balance, and they will be more satisfied with their jobs. Such satisfied employees will be more likely to stay with your company.

You will get to hold on to your best employees and enjoy increased productivity from them. Also, you won’t have to deal with a high turnover, which happens when employees aren’t satisfied with an organization, so you will not need to fill vacant positions as frequently, so you will save on hiring costs.

Your Organization Will Grow Faster

A more-flexible organization will grow more quickly than a rigid organization, because it is always seeking processes and methods that work better than those it currently has. Such an organization will also utilize technology, which will enable its employees to work remotely and to collaborate virtually. Such teamwork tends to be more productive than other work structures, while also costing much less to maintain.

A flexible organization will also identify more opportunities in the environment and will take advantage of these opportunities, thereby enabling itself to profit in environments in which more-rigid companies wouldn’t be able to prosper.

There are too many benefits of a flexible organization to list, but these are most of them. When you enable your company to become adaptable, it is able to evolve with the times, and it will survive longer, becoming continually more prosperous.

Purity of Mind

Purity of Mind. That’s the goal many aim for when they set out on the path of practicing mindfulness and meditation.

But the one mistake they often make, and which they continue to make, while pursuing this goal is that they continue to remain attached to their existing desires, and worse, they continue to form another types of desires all the time.

As long as your mind is filled with any kind of desire no matter how big or small that desire may be how can you say that you have a pure mind?

A pure mind, by its very definition, means a mind that is free of all impurities, and these impurities are nothing but all those desires that you hold up in your mind.

If your mind is pure then it won’t have any desires, and if there are desires then your mind isn’t pure. It’s as simple as that.

However, we won’t be wrong to think that our mind can have different levels of purity. A person with fewer desires should have a purer mind than one with many desires. Right?

So, even if you think that you can’t give up all your desires in life, and I do understand that we all need at least a few basic desires in order to survive and live in this world, what you can do is try to give up as many of these desires as you possibly can from your life.

Besides the number of desires that you have in you, another factor that decides how much purity of mind you have is how intense is the nature of your desires.

You may have only a few desires, or even just a single desire, but if those desires are so intense within you that you keep thinking about them all the time, then that may actually be worse than having several little desires.

So, if you seek purity of mind, the two things you need to work upon are, first, to reduce the number of desires you have and, second, to reduce the intensity of the desires that you have.

Practice these two things in your daily life, and it will be enough to take you closer towards achieving a pure mind some day.

Now, talking about desires, it’s easy for me to tell you to give up your desires, and it’s easy for you to read and understand this. But what’s difficult for both of us is to actually practice this in our daily lives.

Once a desire gets attached to your mind, it becomes hard to detach it and let it go.

So, in reality, before we even begin to work upon removing our existing desires, we should first try not to form any new desires in our mind.

Otherwise, what’s the use of taking so much effort to remove one desire, if you are only going to replace it with another one. If you continue to form one desire after another throughout your life, you will never become free from them, and that also means that you will never become free of suffering.

By not allowing yourself to form any new desires, you at least make sure that you don’t further fall back in your path to achieve purity of mind.

As far as your existing desires are concerned, there is no other way except to try to live your life without indulging in them. I know how hard it can become to live so, but for better or for worse, that’s the only way there is.

When you try to give up your desires, you will find that some desires are easier to give up than others. The ones that are the toughest to give up are those that are deeply ingrained within us, and those that we have let ourself indulge in for the longest period of time.

There are a few basic desires present in all of us because of the nature of our very own body and mind: the desire for food, power, wealth, lust, fame and praise.

More often, it’s some form of these basic desires that are the toughest to give up.

This is because these desires, over a period of time, have formed such a tight grip on our mind that we can’t imagine living our life without them.

For those who only believe in seeking some form of pleasure in their life all the time, even the idea of living their life without any desire seems scary and impossible to them. They may even think that their life has no meaning without their desires.

But what they don’t realize now, and, unfortunately, what they’ll only realize when it’s already too late, is that the only thing these desires lead them to is suffering.

Even when you don’t see this suffering, even as you feel immensely happy in chasing your desires, what you fail to see is that this suffering always exists behind every desire that you chase.

The reason you don’t see, or become aware of, your suffering is that your desires make you think only of the joy that you can have now, and not of the pain that you’ll face tomorrow because of them; they make you think only of the temporary and not of the permanent; they make you think only of yourself and not of the world around you.

To overcome your suffering, you must uproot the very seeds of all these desires so that they are never born again.

Karma yoga is one of the main paths of yoga that a practitioner can follow. The name comes from the Sanskrit term meaning “action” or “deed.” Therefore, it is the path of action, or selfless service towards others. It is considered by some that practicing karma yoga is the most effective way to develop spiritually.

Karma yoga is an ancient concept. The path of karma yoga is described in the Hindu sacred text, the Bhagavad Gita. It is also taught by zen teachers.

The intention when practicing karma yoga is to give selflessly for the good of others without thought of one’s self or attachment to the results of one’s actions. Acting in this way is considered the right way to approach service and it is said to purify the mind.

Karma yoga is relevant to all yogis because, to some extent, everyone must undertake some actions during their lifetime. By practicing karma yoga, all of these actions, even the most mundane, can become part of one’s spiritual path. Practicing karma yoga also means to fully accept one’s dharma, or life’s duty, and to let go of selfish desires. In doing so, one sublimates the ego.

Volunteering one’s time and effort is often used as an example of karma yoga, but, actually, all of the actions one undertakes can be karma yoga. It is considered the attitude to the action, rather than the action itself, which makes something karma yoga. This means acting with the right motives, in the right way, to the best of one’s ability, but surrendering attachment to the outcome. Some teachings recommend using chanting and mantras before and during the actions in order to develop the right mindset and approach to giving selflessly during one’s service.

1. Sanchitta

This is accumulated past actions or karmas waiting to come to fruition. Sanchitta is the storehouse of every action you have ever done, in all the lifetimes you have ever lived. These are all of the unresolved past actions waiting to reach resolution.

2. Parabda

This is the present action: what you are doing now, in this lifetime and its result.

3. Agami

Future actions that result from your present actions are called agami karma. As you attempt to resolve past karma, you unavoidably create new karmas that you may or may not be able to resolve in your present life. If you don’t resolve them now, they will go into the storehouse to be resolved in a future life.

Today I want us to focus on Parabda karma. What are the present actions of how you move, breath, walk, talk, think impacting the next present moment? In other words, what are you doing today that demonstrates you are taking 100% responsibility for your life?

Proactive

Reactive Compliance: Measuring Activity

Many E&C programs, particularly those focused on Reactive Compliance, measure activity metrics, such as:

• Trainings Completed
• Policies Attested
• Cases Reported
• Disclosures offered

These activity metrics provide no insight into the effectiveness of the E&C program. A lot of these companies measuring these types of KPIs are primarily focused on defensive action: the annual Code of Conduct attestation and Code of Conduct Trainings are prime examples of a regulatory defense perspective.

Proactive Ethics: Measuring Effectiveness

In comparison to this we have seen wickedly effective E&C programs measure:

• Employee Engagement
• Ratio – Open Door vs Web/Call Centre
• Ratio – Anonymous vs Disclosed
• Root Cause Analysis
• Sentiment Analysis
• Benchmarking (Internal & External)

Personal ethics is the code of ethical guidelines that guide you in your personal and professional life. They often develop from your core values and work ethic into actionable goals used in a variety of challenging situations. Your personal ethics can, and likely will, contain common ethical guidelines that other people share, but they will vary in their level of importance and how to maintain them.

Some common personal ethics include:

• Integrity
• Selflessness
• Honesty
• Loyalty
• Equality and fairness
• Empathy and respect
• Self-respect

Personal ethics are moral guidelines that can help you through tough situations and make the best decisions. You are likely to use your personal ethics to develop your career and handle many different workplace scenarios. You can develop a clear and effective personal ethics statement that outlines the values you practice in professional settings. In this article, we discuss what personal ethics is, describe how to write a statement and provide a sample to help you craft your own.

What are personal ethics?

Personal ethics is the code of ethical guidelines that guide you in your personal and professional life. They often develop from your core values and work ethic into actionable goals used in a variety of challenging situations. Your personal ethics can, and likely will, contain common ethical guidelines that other people share, but they will vary in their level of importance and how to maintain them.

Some common personal ethics include:

• Integrity
• Selflessness
• Honesty
• Loyalty
• Equality and fairness
• Empathy and respect
• Self-respect

Personal ethics statement

A personal ethics statement is a written declaration of your closely held ethical principles.

Personal ethics statements can be developed for several reasons, including:

College applications: Many colleges are asking for written personal ethics statements from applicants to better understand the qualities and characteristics of prospective students. These statements can help students stand out from the other applicants when their personal ethics align with that of the university or college. Plus, many colleges are making it a requirement in the application process so they can take a closer look at behavior and motivations.

Job applications: Some companies are also asking for personal ethics statements because jobs are becoming more competitive. Personal ethics statements can be a part of the process for any job, but it is most common for leadership positions. Companies frequently look to improve and shape the quality of leadership within they have, which results in asking candidates to detail their personal ethics and apply them to their work and leadership potential.

Performance evaluations: Companies also ask for personal ethics statements at performance reviews to deeply analyze employees’ actions and how they implement the company’s—and their own ethics while on the job. These statements can be very telling since they show whether an employee understands the ethical implications of their actions and are working toward better alignment with the company’s values.

Personal ethics are moral guidelines that can help you through tough situations and make the best decisions. You are likely to use your personal ethics to develop your career and handle many different workplace scenarios. You can develop a clear and effective personal ethics statement that outlines the values you practice in professional settings. In this article, we discuss what personal ethics is, describe how to write a statement and provide a sample to help you craft your own.

Benefits of having a personal ethics statement

There are many benefits to having a personal ethics statement both for your career. Defining your personal ethics makes it easier to talk about in a well-thought-out manner, which may improve your performance in an interview. Personal ethics statements also:

Help you understand your priorities. Having a clear understanding of what matters most to you can assist you in advancing your career. Defining your personal ethics statement can help you understand your priorities. If you prioritize putting other people’s needs first, then you are more likely to be happy in a job where you help people. If you prioritize doing a good job and being highly productive, then you may make a good business leader. These differences in your priorities can help you determine what type of job is best for you and what jobs you should avoid because of conflicts with your personal ethics.

Make decisions easier. Alongside clarifying your priorities, having a personal ethics statement can also make decisions easier. There are many situations where you will need to decide on the right course of action. This is especially true if you lead a team or are a high-level executive in your company. Having a list of criteria can make weighing your options easier.

Improve goal-setting. Once you know what you will and won’t focus on, you can use your personal ethics statement to set goals for your development. You can identify which values matter most to you and identify opportunities and future steps you should pursue.

Refine your leadership style. Creating a personal ethics statement is an effective way to help advance your career, especially when applying to a leadership position or a position that requires a strong set of personal ethics. Knowing what you value and what you stand for can help you decide on a leadership style that enables you to lead teams to progress and success.

The benefits of a happy staff are obvious and self-evident. Aside from the numerous studies that link employee happiness to greater productivity in the workplace a fact that any disgruntled employee could have told you for free an unhappy workforce simply makes for a miserable environment.

While misery may love company, companies do not reciprocate the feeling. A despondent staff can be exhausting to interact with and low energy in their output.

Existential appeasement

Clear objectives and vision for business: While in a perfect world everyone would work to his or her fullest capabilities everyday, life does not work this way. Often, the eternal recurrence of day-in day-out repetition traps employees in a Kafkaesque nightmare of meaningless drudgery.

Psychologists will tell you that well-defined goals engender a more disciplined work ethic. Defined goals provide employees with a sense of purpose and allow them to understand how their work contributes to the final product or service.

Work without context feels aimless and ultimately alienates the individual from the team and vision they should feel proud to be part of.

Transparency: Just as you should be upfront about the goals and vision of the company, you should also be transparent about the state of the company. According to an employee survey from TinyPulse, transparency is the “No. 1 contributor to employee happiness…”

Stressing over rumors of layoffs or fears of economic downturn only serve to disrupt an employee’s focus. Even if the only news you have to share is bad news, be honest. The result will be much better than the anxiety and passive aggression likely to arise from an uninformed and frightened staff.

Help employees define their professional narrative: Given the high mobility of younger employees, jumping from company to company, mentorship might seem like a relic of the distant past, but this is not true. If you work to build your employees, they will work harder for you. Loyalty breeds loyalty.

Help your employees see how the work they do benefits them. Whether this means asking them about their five-year plan over lunch or discussing with them possible next steps after they out-grow their current role, these discussions will alleviate any doubt about the meaning of their work in their own lives and the purpose they should feel doing it.

Flexibility

Allow employees to make their own schedule: The monotony of the 9 to 5 workday is unnecessary and old fashioned. Allowing your employees to make their own hours, and judging them not by time served but by productivity, will give your employees a rewarding sense of freedom.

Many progressive companies, such as Netflix, have adopted make your own schedule policies and research shows that allowing employees to do so increases productivity.

Work from home option: With most office jobs being computer-based nowadays, offering a work from home option to your employees is a great way to boost happiness. The trick here is to make sure that all employees have the same benefit, as those who do not receive the option to work from home are sure to become disgruntled.

Also, keeping it an option is best, as some people (likely more extroverted people) will not like the isolation of working from home, while others (likely more introverted people) will thrive outside the office.

It’s the little things.

Cut back on meetings: While meetings are a vital part of any organization facilitating communication and a free exchange of ideas too many meetings, or meetings without structure, can bog down the workday and waste time.

The good news is that keeping your employees happy is not an impossible feat. Aside from the common sense things, like growth opportunities, good benefits, clear communication and recognizing employee success, their are a few other moves you can make to keep your employees smiling and working hard.

1. Put it in writing

A handwritten thank-you to your direct reports, colleagues or boss can be more meaningful than an email. Such an effort requires some stationery, a little extra time to craft and deliver, but is often appreciated by the recipient. Employers need to promote a positive culture that includes recognition and feeling appreciated to attract and retain great people.

2. Conduct a teambuilding event

It could be a friendly Academy Awards or March Madness competition, an off-site volunteer event, or ropes course. Such activities can help staff learn more about their coworkers and boost morale in the workplace. Make sure it’s presented as optional or that there’s something for everyone; not everyone may be a movie buff or sports fan.

3. Have a party

Celebrating coworkers’ milestones such as birthdays, anniversaries, baby showers or good work can build comradery and bring employees together, especially if it’s for a good cause. Be clear that contributions are voluntary, and remember that happiness comes from more than just a free lunch or annual holiday party. If people don’t feel valued by your firm, these perks won’t make much of a difference.

“The key for managers is to express gratitude and to be really specific about the particular effort the employee made,” Carter says, “because that’s when people feel seen and recognized.”

4. Ask for inspiration

There’s no secret ingredient to increasing happiness levels in the office. What works for a small CPA firm might not fly at a larger organization. Sure, you have to pay people well, but creating a great place to work where employees have pride in what they do begins with you.

Unless you’re a mind reader, you’ll never know what instills pride and motivation in your employees, until you ask. Then, follow through. Follow-up on that feedback and empower your employees to create a better workplace.

5. Give them a sense of empowerment

Engaging your staff by giving them a chance to make decisions on their own, or with minimal direction, improves workplace happiness by making them feel more valued. Let them flex their creative muscles and influence important decisions in their jobs.

The dictionary definition of humility says: “The quality or condition of being humble; modest opinion or estimate of one’s own importance, rank, etc.”

Humility is considered a state of being, highlighted by your behavior and approach to things. It’s also considered one of the virtues of the human condition, along with kindness, patience, diligence, charity, temperance and chastity.

Humility is often thought to occur in the absence of pride. To C.S. Lewis, pride was about competition and therefore not a virtue. Pride manifests in people thinking they are “cleverer” or “richer”, for instance.

On the other hand, in the absence of pride, you find humility, which sees no need for competition. In humility, you are nothing more and nothing less than the other people around you.

In essence, humility is not about hiding away or about becoming a ‘wallflower’, but it is about the realization your abilities and actions are not better or less. Humility doesn’t require the ranking of things, but it calls for the understanding of the true value or worth of things.

One important point about humility is how it can’t be faked. But this doesn’t mean humility is difficult; in fact, it’s one of the simplest things in the world. But the more you start thinking about how to be more humble, the harder you make it for yourself to actually be humble.

Instead of focusing on the humility within you, you should pay more attention to celebrating the achievements of others. It is by acknowledging others and understanding the universal values we all share that you start becoming more humble. In a way, understanding the vastness of the world around us can make us realize our own value and the humility we should feel.

Humility is the quality of being humble. Dictionary definitions accentuate humility as a low self-regard and sense of unworthiness. In a religious context humility can mean a recognition of self in relation to a deity (i.e. God) or deities, and subsequent submission to said deity as a member of that religion. Outside of a religious context, humility is defined as being “unselved”, a liberation from consciousness of self, a form of temperance that is neither having pride (or haughtiness) nor indulging in self-deprecation.

Humility is an outward expression of an appropriate inner, or self regard, and is contrasted with humiliation which is an imposition, often external, of shame upon a person. Humility may be misappropriated as ability to suffer humiliation through self-denouncements which in itself remains focused on self rather than low self-focus.

Humility, in various interpretations, is widely seen as a virtue which centers on low self-preoccupation, or unwillingness to put oneself forward, so it is in many religious and philosophical traditions, it contrasts with narcissism, hubris and other forms of pride and is an idealistic and rare intrinsic construct that has an extrinsic side.

Humility and leadership

Recent research suggests that humility is a quality of certain types of leaders. For example, Jim Collins and his colleagues found that a certain type of leader, whom they term “level 5”, possesses humility and fierce resolve. Humility is being studied as a trait that can enhance leadership effectiveness. The research suggests that humility is multi-dimensional and includes self-understanding and awareness, openness, and perspective taking.

Financial managers must have the skills to handle large sums of other peoples’ money, but skill alone isn’t enough. The potential for financial managers to line their own pockets or ruin a client or company through bad judgment is immense. It’s essential to have a code of ethics in finance and to live up to those principles every day.

Financial managers shouldn’t see the code as setting a limit on ethical behavior: Tick off all the boxes, and you’re good. Having ethics in finance means doing the right thing, even in situations that aren’t covered on the list. If in doubt, find someone with the standing to give you ethical guidance.

Conflicts of Interest

Underlying the role of ethics in financial management is a fiduciary duty. Managers must act in the interests of their clients and employers, not their own. If there’s a conflict of interest where you can enrich yourself while harming a client, you must side with the client.

Bernie Madoff, for example, served as both a broker for his clients and a custodian for their money. With both roles combined, there was no independent auditing of his operations, which made it easier to defraud his clients of millions.

That’s why establishing internal controls is essential. When the risk of exposure is high, it’s less tempting to steal.

Security and Information

In the networked 21st century, ethical conduct includes how you handle and secure information. The security breach at the Equifax credit bureau, for example, may have affected confidential credit and personal data belonging to 143 million Americans. Strategic CFO magazine suggests that a proper code of ethics could have led to better protection for people’s data and more transparency after the breach occurred.

Reputation and Ethics in Finance

Another role of ethics in financial management is to guard your and your employer’s reputation. If you act ethically, you’re in the clear. However, cross the lines, and you can destroy your company’s good name as well as your own.

Some regulators and lawmakers assumed the risk of scandal and loss of reputation were sufficient to discourage financial managers from acting unethically. Repeated financial mismanagement cases in the 21st century have shown that the largest finance companies can sail through a scandal with no loss of business.

Some industry analysts say tighter regulation is necessary because ethics in finance can’t withstand temptation.

Ethics in Finance vs. Rewards

One problem with living up to a code of ethics in finance is that the system sometimes rewards unethical behavior. If an organization rewards financial manager for making decisions that benefit the company, not the clients, some financial managers will stumble.

Wells Fargo, for example, wound up in trouble when it turned out employees had opened accounts without customers’ permission to meet sales targets. In the banking industry, misselling to customers is a serious breach of ethics. If the rewards system prioritizes targets over ethics, it’s too tempting for some to pass up.

Transparency

Financial documents reflect a company’s performance relative to its peers, and its internal strengths and weaknesses. Regulatory agencies require publicly traded companies to submit periodic financial statements and make full disclosures of material information. A change in the senior executive ranks, buyout offers, loss or win of a major contract and new product launches are examples of material information. Transparency also means explaining financial information clearly, especially for those who aren’t familiar with the company’s operations. Financial managers should not hide, obscure or otherwise render relevant financial information impossible for ordinary shareholders to understand.

Ethical violations

The most frequently occurring ethical violations in finance relate to insider trading, stakeholder interest versus stockholder interest, investment management, and campaign financing. Businesses in general and financial markets in particular are replete with examples of violations of trust and loyalty in both public and private dealings. Fraudulent financial dealings, influence peddling and corruption in governments, brokers not maintaining proper records of customer trading, cheating customers of their trading profits, unauthorized transactions, insider trading, misuse of customer funds for personal gain, mis-pricing customer trades, and corruption and larceny in banking have become common occurrences.

Insider trading is perhaps one of the most publicized unethical behaviors by traders. Insider trading refers to trading in the securities of a company to take advantage of material “inside” information about the company that is not available to the public. Such a trade is motivated by the possibility of generating extraordinary gain with the help of nonpublic information (information not yet made public). It gives the trader an unfair advantage over other traders in the same security. Insider trading was legal in some European countries until recently. In the United States, the 1984 Trading Sanctions Act made it illegal to trade in a security while in the possession of material non-public information. The law applies to both the insiders, who have access to nonpublic information, and the people with whom they share such information.

Professional ethics encompass the personal and corporate standards of behavior expected by professionals.

The word professionalism originally applied to vows of a religious order. By at least the year 1675, the term had seen secular application and was applied to the three learned professions: Divinity, Law, and Medicine. The term professionalism was also used for the military profession around this same time.

Professionals and those working in acknowledged professions exercise specialist knowledge and skill. How the use of this knowledge should be governed when providing a service to the public can be considered a moral issue and is termed professional ethics.

It is capable of making judgments, applying their skills, and reaching informed decisions in situations that the general public cannot because they have not attained the necessary knowledge and skills. One of the earliest examples of professional ethics is the Hippocratic oath to which medical doctors still adhere to this day.

Components

Some professional organizations may define their ethical approach in terms of a number of discrete components. Typically these include Honesty, Trustworthiness, Transparency, Accountability, Confidentiality, Objectivity, Respect, Obedience to the law, and Loyalty.

Implementation

Most professionals have internally enforced codes of practice that members of the profession must follow to prevent exploitation of the client and to preserve the integrity and reputation of the profession. This is not only for the benefit of the client but also for the benefit of those belonging to that profession. Disciplinary codes allow the profession to define a standard of conduct and ensure that individual practitioners meet this standard, by disciplining them from the professional body if they do not practice accordingly. This allows those professionals who act with a conscience to practice in the knowledge that they will not be undermined commercially by those who have fewer ethical qualms. It also maintains the public’s trust in the profession, encouraging the public to continue seeking their services.

Internal regulation

In cases where professional bodies regulate their own ethics, there are possibilities for such bodies to become self-serving and fail to follow their own ethical code when dealing with renegade members. This is particularly true of professions in which they have almost a complete monopoly on a particular area of knowledge. For example, until recently, the English courts deferred to the professional consensus on matters relating to their practice that lay outside case law and legislation.

Statutory regulation

In many countries there is some statutory regulation of professional ethical standards such as the statutory bodies that regulate nursing and midwifery in England and Wales. Failure to comply with these standards can thus become a matter for the courts.

Businesses today are technology and innovation driven. There is huge competition in the sphere and therefore like other industry or business function ethics is essential here also. Specially because ethics by itself is only a tool to create and doesn’t know ethics or morals!

Every day we have innovative products and services that announce their arrival in the market place and others that go obsolete. It is this technology and innovation that leads to ethical issues, considering the competition to stay ahead by innovating is immense. Issues like data mining, invasion to privacy, data theft and workplace monitoring are common and critical.

In technology we speak of ethics in two contexts; one is whether the pace of technological innovation is benefiting the humankind or not, the other is either severely empowering people while choking others for the same. Technology, for example, has drastically replaced people at work.

In the first case we are compelled to think about the pace at which technology is progressing. There are manifold implications here, be it things like computer security or viruses, Trojans, spam’s that invade the privacy of people or the fact the technology is promoting consumerism.

Nowadays data storage is primarily on computer systems. With the advent of internet technology the world has got interconnected and data can be accessed remotely by those who are otherwise unauthorized to do the same. This is one of the pitfalls of innovation. The other one i.e. the pace of technological change also raises the question of ethics.

New products make their way and leave the existing ones obsolete. In fact technological change and innovation is at the heart of consumerism, which is bad for economy and environment in general. The recent economic downturn makes up for a very good example.

Increasingly technological products are adding up to environmental degradation. Computer screens, keyboards, the ink used in the printers are some of the ways in which technology is polluting the environment. All these produce toxins that cannot be decomposed easily.

The other major issue in technology that brings in ethics is interface between technology and the computers. Many scientists are of the opinion that the world will come to an end with a war between the humankind and the technology. Technology they say will advance to an extent beyond the control of those who have made it!

No doubt technology has replaced people at work and made certain others redundant. On the flip side many people have been raised to power while others have been severely handicapped. The latter is especially true for third world countries. New manufacturing processes that are outsourced either replace manpower there or either exploits the latter in the name of employment by engaging them cheaper prices.

Technology has also made inroads into the field of medicine and life care. New cloning techniques, genetic modifications or other life saving drugs need continuous monitoring and surveillance. Bioethics has thus emerged as ethics in the field of medical technology.

Whereas we cannot talk of controlling technology and innovation, the better way is to adapt and change. The role of ethics in technology is of managing rather controlling the same. Continuous monitoring is required to keep track of latest innovations and technological changes and for ensuring fair practices.