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Did You Bring Your Ethics to Work Today?

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Submitted By liyanalynn
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Did you bring your ethics to work today?

Think you are a person of integrity and that you bring your highest standards of ethics to your workplace each day?

Despite hundreds of pages of policies, codes of ethics, codes of conduct, organizational values, and carefully defined work environments, company cultures, lapses in workplace ethics occur every day.
Lapses in workplace ethics result from inappropriate officer behavior such as insider stock trading, expense account fraud, sexual harassment, and involvement in conflicts of interest. Lapses in workplace ethics do not need to rise to that level to impact the workplace environment you provide for employees though. Lapses in workplace ethics can occur because of simple issues such as toilet paper, copy machines, and lunch signup lists.

In a nationally important workplace ethics case, Hewlett-Packard company's, successful CEO, Mark Hurd, (now former H-P CEO), became embroiled in workplace ethics issues. I have no insider knowledge, but the public statement from the company indicated that Mr. Hurd left because he violated the company’s expected standards of conduct.
Cathie Lesjak, H-P's chief financial officer, who was appointed interim CEO until the company can find a permanent replacement for Mr. Hurd, asked employees “to remain ‘focused’ and said ‘Mark had failed to disclose a close personal relationship he had with the contractor that constituted a conflict of interest, failed to maintain accurate expense reports, and misused company assets.’”

You can violate the spoken and unspoken, published and unpublished, code of conduct in your organization without a CEO title and without your actions rising to the level of conflict of interests and questionable expense accounting.

Examples of Lapses in Workplace Ethics
Each failure to practice value-based workplace ethics affects your self image and what you

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