Implementation of Business Ethics in the Company essay
Besides the code of ethics and ethical training, an organization should also implement ethical infrastructure aimed at resolving ethical issues, establishing ethical standards, formulating and sharing corporate values. An important part of this infrastructure is constituted by ethics committees the function of which is supervision of ethical conduct.
It is essential to distinguish between company ethics departments and ethics committees (Parraga, 2013): ethics committee is aimed to respond to emerging ethical issues in the company and should be to a reasonable extent independent from major corporate structures. The purpose of this paper is to choose an organization, to investigate whether it uses ethical committees, to examine the format used for committees if there are any and to draft a plan for establishing ethical committees if there are none.
The considered company is Walmart Stores Inc. This is a multinational retailer which operates globally and is the largest world’s employer (Walmart, 2014). Walmart created a Global Ethics Office which is responsible for ethics reporting, ethical education and guiding employees in ethical decision-making. Part of the structure of Walmart ethics office are Compliance and Ethics Committees created for each of international retail markets (Walmart, 2014). The structure of these committees is similar to the structure of Global Compliance and Ethics Committee: both types of committees consist of senior executives and are chaired by the company’s compliance and ethics executives (Walmart, 2014). Committee members discuss ethical issues, review progress, plan improvements, assign responsibility and establish accountability (Walmart, 2014).
The functions and presence of ethical committees at Walmart are consistent with the requirements of Parraga (2013) to corporate ethics infrastructure, but the position of ethics committees in the company’s structure is different. It is not clear whether the members of Walmart’s ethics committee are elected or appointed, but corporate responsibility report does not mention any election procedure. Furthermore, committees are strongly integrated into the company’s structure and therefore lack objectivity and independence. Hence, Walmart should introduce a more independent system of ethics committees where members would be of different origin and would be elected for a particular term. In this case, Walmart will be able to improve its ethical objectivity and quality of ethical decision-making.
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