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What you will do ...

12 January, 2015 - 10:56
Available under Creative Commons-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/3d8499e9-08c0-47dd-9482-7e8131ce99bc@11.15

Executive Summary

The executive summary should be no more than one page. Expect to write this several times because it needs to be the clearest and best written section. Written for your CEO, it should provide a quick two minute summary of your ethics plan. Write it in active voice, use ordinary language, and make references throughout the summary to the sections of the report that provide more in-depth analysis of the issue at hand. In this section you will tell your reader what you are going to say in the report.

Socio-Technical System

  • This section will provide both a table and written description to help your reader understand the sociotechnical system in which your company works and which provides the ethical and social challenges to which your program will respond.
  • For information on how to compose a STS table and the different frames covered refer to module m14025, Socio-Technical Systems in Professional Decision-Making. The table for Burger Man provides frames that will be most relevant to this module but there are also other STS tables adopted for use in power engineering and engineering practice in Puerto Rico.
  • Your written analysis should summarize and explore in more detail the STS issues that you are addressing in your corporate ethics plan. These would include compliance issues as well as fields in which your corporation's aspirations could be realized.

Corporate Code of Ethics

  • Your job here is to write a code of ethics for your corporation emphasizing the key value aspirations and CSR challenges that your are targeting in your ethics program. Your code should include...
  • The values that form your corporation's highest and central commitments.
  • A description or profile of each value. See the Developing a Statement of Values module for more on this.
  • How your values apply to both the corporation's stakeholders and to its key CSR challenges.
  • You should be clear about the function your code is playing both within your ethics plan and within the corporate organization. Six key functions are (1) to educate, (2) to foster an ethical dialogue, (3) to discipline employees, (4) to support employees in their efforts to realize the corporation's core commitments/values, (5) to communicate these commitments/values to employees and other stakeholders, and (6) to serve as a public testament of the key ethical and value commitments that define the integrity of your organization.

Ethics Training Program

  • This section details how you educate employees on the key components of your ethics program including the core ethical and value commitments. It should also provide means for getting employee buy-in for the ethics program as well as components that help employees with special ethical challenges. It should include the following:
  • How you plan to educate employees on the company's code of ethics.
  • How the company's core ethical values and principles should be integrated in the company's key operations including setting policy, strategic planning and decision-making.
  • How your ethics program addresses your company's moral ecology. (Is it finance-, customer-, or quality driven? How do employees develop successful moral careers and modes of ethical advocacy within each of these companies? How does your ethics training program support this process?)

CSR Challenges

  • Several companies have special challenges in CSR. For example, Coca Cola when operating in India finds itself sharing scarce water resources with local, subsistence farmers. What are their responsibilities in this context? Relate your CSR challenge to the STS description in the second section.
  • Develop a response to this CSR challenge. How does this realize your company's key moral values?
  • Contextualize your company's CSR response within a general CSR perspective: shareholder, stakeholder, alliance.

Recruitment and Leadership Strategies for Implementing Ethics

  • In this section you will describe how you will realize your core objectives in recruiting new employees and in developing a leadership style.
  • Consider, for example, how you will integrate values into the different components of your corporation's recruiting mechanism. Justice in the job description. Communicating to new employees their job and moral responsibilities. Recruiting employees who will be able to develop successful moral careers in the moral ecology of your company.
  • Recognizing and responding to ethical risks such as maintaining privacy and property.

Conclusion

In the executive summary, you have told your reader what you are going to say in this report. The main body of the report contains what you need to say. This final section tells the reader what you have said by recapitulating and summarizing the report's high points. Include a time frame for implementing your ethics program as well as a description of the program's needs.