Such Is The Importance of Ethics

When we're talking about establishing an ethical business culture, the small things matter. Yet, too often, we let the small things slide, we turn the other way, we don't make it our business.

Here's a comment from a reader that addresses how the small things -- the ethics of soft skills -- can have a huge impact on a company. I think it's quite eloquent.

Ethics Can Save Your Company
Posted as a comment by: M. Bison, May 7, 2008
Never underestimate the importance of ethics. People may think that such soft skills never affect the bottom line, but they very well do. The presence of ethics is important from the low-level employee to the more obvious status of an executive.

Let me give you a small example: An employee seeks to take advantage of his boss' trust and overclocks his hours, getting paid for unnecessary overtime. Also, this employee frequently expenses costly business trips and lunch meetings on the company. In essence, he's using up the company's resources. While this may not be a big issue if it were just one employee, but think if such a mentality becomes a company-wide trend: you'll have a business that eats itself from the inside out!

Now let me give you a big example, and this is a true story, so I'll be vague. A startup company with executives on the rise have begun experiencing success. Several of their products have greatly profited the company -- so well in fact that its employees and lower-level managers have begun to expect either a pay increase or, at the very least, added resources to lighten the workload. Months later, no changes were made -- the employees were still overworked and underpaid; the momentum from the job well done were expended and morale has sunk. What had happened to the profit? It turns out the executives pocketed it for themselves. Because the company was a startup, there was no organization of checks and balances. For a company so young, everything relied on ethics. Now the company is experiencing losses, the very people who generated the profit are quitting, and the company is running on reserves, on the verge of bankruptcy.

Such is the importance of ethics.