An ethical culture is needed and expected in business

Given the fact that all companies today are rethinking strategies into the future, looking at disruptive innovation or creative disruption, I would like to remind everybody that building and maintaining an ethical business culture must be part of the agenda.

- Henry J. Schumacher

Business leaders have to be aware that being caught in corruption, unfair competition, data breaches, cybercrime etc. will not only lead to heavy fines but will definitely affect the reputation of the company.

So let’s talk about building an ethical culture in practice. What is the difference between ethics and building a culture of trust?

Ethics are a set of principles. An ethical culture is a culture committed to pursuing those principles — and sometimes the pursuit of those principles leads an employee to take actions somebody else might dislike. Perhaps the employee reports suspicions of misconduct, involving bribery or collusion in competition or mismanagement of data privacy.

Either way, the employee needs to trust that the company will support that decision to step forward. The apparatus of a corporate compliance program—the training, the internal reporting systems, the Code of Conduct, the due diligence procedures; all of it—should work toward the goal of a strong sense of trust within the organization.