Professional Ethics | Aparna Sharma | Senior HR Professional & Certified Corporate Director I Editor’s Collection

Professional ethics are principles that govern the behaviour of a person or group in a business environment. Like values, professional ethics provide rules about how a person should act towards other people and institutions in such an environment.

Professional ethics encompass the personal and corporate standards of behavior expected by professionals.

Some of the important components of professional ethics that professional organizations necessarily include in their Code of Conduct (COC) or usually called Code of Business Conduct (COBC) are integrity, honesty, transparency, respectfulness towards the job, confidentiality, objectivity etc.

Good Ethics is a fundamental requirement of any profession. It is integral to the
success of the business as well. Ethics is a system of moral principles governing the appropriate conduct of a person or a group. Maintaining good ethics is being
consistent with the principles of correct moral conduct constantly.

“Good ethics is good business”, as it not only leads to run the business successfully, but it also provides many ways for growth and development by leaving a good impression about an organization in the market.

An organization strives continually to be in pursuit of its goals while benefiting the
employees in building up their high competencies. In this direction, the adherence to high ethical standards of the employees can be very much contributory to the
impressive achievements of business goals as planned and intended.

Ethics refers to human conduct as to make judgements between what is right and
what is wrong. It could be that there are several factors that may encourage one to adopt unethical behaviour, but the right person is he who, despite facing ethical
dilemmas, assesses the situations and makes differentiation between what is morally good and bad in order to follow the rules and code of professional conduct.

Good ethics causes to gain confidence of superiors while promoting integrity, which means to continue doing right things even when we are not watched.

Ethical conduct, or professional decision-making, is a necessary requisite to being called a professional. A professional must be able to properly balance competing values in making decisions that affect both society and the client, especially where personal, societal, and cultural values conflict.

The importance of ethics in professional life can be evidenced by a number of
instances showing failure of businesses and several scandals. It may be rightly said that the situations would not have been so worsened had there been observance of ethical standards. Therefore, maintaining ethical standards is must for the prosperity of an organization as well as the development of one’s personality. Good ethics will lead us to maintain our honest image. It will enable us to refrain from such activities that may discredit to our profession.

Thus, adhesion to good ethics is to let our conscience be our guide at all times. Albert Schweitzer says, “Ethics is the activity of man directed to secure the inner perfection of his own personality.”