Welcome to KPMG's Business Ethics web site. Our mission is to be a facilitator of the best and brightest thinking taking place on ethics. Here, you will find a clearinghouse an electronic town hall for a discussion of critical ethical issues. The key feature of the site is our interactive ethical dilemma that lets you study hypothetical business situations, answer a series of questions about the situation and compare your answers with those of other visitors to the site. Our current dilemma focuses on religious diversity in the workplace.We also provide links to other ethics-related web sites and information about our services. Before you start surfing our site, here's an overview of today's business ethics environment.
Today's Business Ethics Environment
These findings are disturbing, especially in light of the fact that unethical behavior among North American companies costs about $100 billion a year: to investigate and resolve the activities in question and to put mechanisms in place to ensure that problems do not reoccur. That's the bad news. The good news is that many business leaders are studying the corporate culture and climate of their organizations. As a result, they are embracing the concept of the business ethic process and are looking to independent firms such as KPMG to assess their needs and make recommendations for improvement.
What is the Business Ethics Process? An effective business ethics process is one of the first and most important lines of defense against unethical or illegal activities. The first step in establishing a good business ethics process is to access and diagnose four key factors: ethical climate, performance incentives, communications (downstream and upstream) and compliance. Following is how we define each factor, together with sample questions that are asked during an ethics assessment. Ethical climateDefinition:Ethical climate refers to an organization's culture, environment, motives, and pressures. It is the role of senior executives to establish, drive and reinforce ethical climate throughout an organization. If their "tone at the top" differs from the tone at other levels, the organization's ethical climate will be questionable.Points of Interest:When assessing the ethical climate of an organization, research the following questions:
Performance IncentivesDefinition:Achieving organizational objectives is the driving force behind performance incentives: methods employed by the organization to motivate and direct employee behavior in order to meet the company's goals.
Points of Interest:When assessing performance incentives, research the following questions:
CommunicationsDefinition:Communications refers to the messages employees receive about acceptable and unacceptable behavior and the priority of these messages. Communications can be "downstream" or "upstream." Downstream refers to codes of conduct, training programs, human resource activities, and employee communications that are communicated by top management to rank-and-file employees. Upstream refers to both formal and informal methods of communication, i.e., hotlines versus employee grapevines that are communicated by rank-and-file employees to top management.Points of Interest:When assessing the communications structure in plan, research the following questions:
ComplianceDefinition:Compliance refers to the organization's business practices, corporate policies and procedures, laws, rules, and regulations.Points of Interest:When assessing compliance, research the following questions:
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