Business Ethics: Monitoring and Evaluation

The practice of moral standards in an organization is a process that requires to be measured to ascertain its effectiveness. Business firms may adversely be affected by immoral ethical practices. The results of moral presentations are displayed through customer responses, employees' behavior and company achievements. The ethical standards can be tested with the following parameters;

Quality of service/product

Where employees' ethical standards are compromised, the resultant is an irresponsible and less productive team. The staffs are demoralized. The company goals are not realized. Similarly, a management team that practices unsound ethical code of conduct sets a bad example to the associate staff. Creativity in production, hard work, commitment, professionalism, and responsibility are compromised. Low quality products or serviced are delivered. Customer dissatisfaction and decreased business volume is experienced.

Rate of personnel turnover

Personnel turnover is measure of employees exit from a company compared to those joining the company in a particular period of time. The rate of personnel turnover is expressed as the difference between the employees exiting the company and those employed in a particular period, over the total number of employees then expressed as a percentage. Usually, a turnover rate of less than 15% is considered 'health' for a company. A time frame of five years is mainly considered when calculating this rate of turnover. However, this can be changed depending on other factors or company policies. Ethical code of conduct often determines the rate at which staffs leave a company.

Grievances and complaints

Increase in workers' complaints depicts an unsound ethical code of conduct expressed by the management. For instance, low wages, poor work environment and discrimination may lead to complaints. Similarly, the consumers may complaint of substandard goods or services, poor reception and clientele handling. This implies that the internal and external customers' relationship is affected by poor ethical practices resulting to poor production, under production and lack of customer care.

Employee morale and performance

Associate staff may be influenced by poor ethics. The management should carry out a research to determine any poor performance to ascertain if it is as a result of the existing ethical standards. Through communication meetings, the management can obtain vital information as to the low levels of morale. The use of questionnaires can be applied to gather more information about ethics presentation and their effect on performance. Once the weak ethical practices are identified, corrective measures can be applied to rectify the situation.

Post consumption behavior

When a consumer is dissatisfied with company product, they present complaints to the company management. This is a post consumption behavior. However, in some cases, the consumer does not report the matter to the company in question. They sort to buy their products from other companies. It is the responsibility of the management to 'keep an eye' and monitor the behavior of the consumer. A proactive measure is adopted where the company initiates process of research to determine the satisfaction level of their clients. A good management should not wait for its customers to complaint or move to other similar companies. It should keep in touch to ensure that the products and services offered are up to the expectations of the consumers. Unethical company practices such as late and poor wage payments, discrimination, hard lined management systems may cause poor service delivery and substandard production.

Compare and analyze current and previous results

Company performance results can be used to measure the effectiveness of ethical standards. Whereas there are other factors that affect the performance of an organization, poor ethical presentation by both management and associate staff may greatly influence the results of a company. Decreased revenue and customer base may signal poor ethical presentations in the company. .