What I found interesting was the obligation to your employer section (pg. 23). One of the four obligations, is loyalty and it says you should act in your employers interest, not your own. Then it also talks about if your company is doing something unethical and there are no resources or management in place to help correct the issue you should take it to the media or public, as whistleblowing (pg. 33). Now, what if it was in your company's interest was to perform unethical duties? Should you stay loyal to them or point out their problems to the public?
I think that another good example of a company that is ethically conscientious is Southwest Airlines. They make it their point to put the priorities, which are most crucial to the companies existence first and for them it is customer service and employee happiness. Below I included the procedures manual and you can find in part 6 their code of ethics. The way I think Southwest prevents unethical happenings is through a few different things. Like most companies they have news articles, FAQ, company info, and a customer complaint hotline but they also have a blog (which you can comment on), a twitter account, and facebook account. With the blog they inform you on the less important events and happenings within the company. What is really unique is how they utilize their twitter and facebook accounts, it’s like another source of customer service. People can access twitter and facebook so quickly with their phones that if they are waiting around for a flight and it got delayed or cancelled, they post it to Southwest. Southwest doesn’t want negative feedback but they can’t control what is posted on these sites so they do a good job to prevent it.
An example of how Southwest tries to stay ethical is when one of the planes blew a hole in the fuselage in flight. I feel most airlines would have said it was a one in a million chance of happening and swept it under the rug. Southwest grounded 80 of their aircraft to inspect them and they had apologies on all of their internet resources and current updates on how they were solving the issue. I included the NTSB report for the accident.
NTSB
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief.aspx?ev_id=20110401X24330&key=1
Southwest Manual
http://www.southwest.com/assets/pdfs/corporate-commitments/supplier-commitment.pdf?int=GFOOTER-ABOUT-SUPPLIER
just for fun
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvdCFYLf_JI&feature=fvst
The ethical codes of corporations that get to be so important nowadays did not come into being at once. They emerged from individual ethical standards and corporate consciousness. Moreover, the public demand for prosecution of any violations of corporate, professional and business ethics has been increased. However corporation still have away to go to prevent people like Bernie Madoff from taken advantage of Americans. Honestly I think specially in America where greed seems to take precedence over ethics, Southwest did what they did just so people would not stop using their air lines. Because they know in today’s world, mass media made possible for society to reveal secrets that were kept from the public before.
ReplyDeleteNicole I first want to say thanks for the entertaining video. I want to be on a flight with that flight attendant.
ReplyDeleteYou do a great job here of connecting the reading with an example and then providing weblinks to relevant information. You are doing all three things I am looking for: showing evidence of reading, analyzing, and taking advanatge of the affordances of blogs.