Monthly Archives: April 2017

Culture heavily influences how companies and businesses operate. A company from the U.S., for example, will not function and work the same way as a company from the Philippines; they’ll have different expectations for employees, codes of conduct, and values. Because culture plays such a strong and influential role in business operations, both negative and positive impacts can be made. One startling example of such an impact is karoshi, a Japanese word defined as “death from overwork.”

As Jason Fan writes in his post “Karoshi – Death from Over Work“, “…workers in Japan are pushed too far in the work place and a more ethical method of running business needs to be considered.” This quote highlights how Japan’s work culture, described as having “the worst standards for long working hours among advanced nations“, actively harms the health and well-being of millions of people employed in Japan. As well, karoshi exemplifies how culture can negatively impact businesses and workers.

What does karoshi, a Japanese-centric problem, tell us about culture? It explains that although cultural differences, in most cases, are things to be celebrated, some differences in culture are negative in their impact and should be shunned and changed. Karoshi, especially, emphasizes this point, as it outright involves the death of people as a result of being pushed to their limits in the workplace.

What can be done to remedy this problem in Japanese businesses? In the same way that cultural differences can highlight how cultures can negatively impact businesses, exposure to, and understanding of, different cultures within the Japanese workplace can result in the opposite effect. By being familiar with work-hour regulations and worker protections in other nations, Japanese employees could realize that they, too, deserve reasonable hours from their employers as well as government protection. This, in turn, could lead to an overhaul in how Japan and its businesses operate in the future.

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By this point in time, most people are familiar with the Volkswagen emissions scandal. Unethical and illegal business practices by one of the largest car manufacturers in the world, Volkswagen, resulted in numerous complaints, lawsuits, and fines against the German company. To date, Volkswagen “has paid out more than $20 billion to buy back or repair cars and pay criminal and civil fines and legal settlements related to the scandal.”

That astounding number, $20 billion, helps to highlight how damaging unethical and illegal business practices can be to companies. Contrastingly, that number also strongly emphasizes the importance of conducting business legally, ethically, and fairly. In this situation, one of the criterion for making ethical choices, the utilitarian criterion, was ignored; the company decided that profits for the company and its shareholders were more important than the millions of lives that were impacted by the above-regulation levels of pollution and emissions produced by their vehicles.

Scandals and unethical business conduction are not uncommon in the business world. Many companies in the past and present such as Enron, Wells Fargo, and Volkswagen have done unethical things for the sake of profit and corporate gain. In the case of Enron, the decisions made and the practices exercised by executives and employees of the firm resulted in the company’s bankruptcy back in 2001. As well, multiple high-profile individuals within the company were fined or jailed for their participation in the scandal. These cases of deception and shady business raise the question: Why do business do these things? Of course, the obvious answer is profits and financial gain. But beyond profits, what causes companies to do things even knowing that they’re morally wrong or illegal?

The answer is ethical work climate. The ethical work climate of a company, an extension of the firm’s organizational culture, establishes what actions or decisions are considered “right” or “wrong” within the company. In the cases of Enron and Volkswagen, their ethical work climates blurred the distinction between “right” and “wrong”, leading many people within both companies to disregard the moral implications and impacts of their decisions. Their punishments, however, are messages to companies saying that unethical business does not pay off.

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Feedback is a tremendously powerful tool that is often taken for granted. I’m sure many of us have been in situations where we’ve said to ourselves “Am I doing this right?” or “I think there’s a better way to do this.” Reflecting on those moments now, we all likely would’ve wanted someone guiding us on how to do the job properly or outright telling us what we were doing wrong. As you reflect on those times in your life when you were lost and confused, you start to understand why feedback is so important and helpful.

In Karen Naumann’s “5 Reasons Why Feedback is Important“, she lists and details how providing and receiving feedback can help us grow as individuals, become more innovative, and propel us forward whenever we feel stuck. What really piqued my interest when reading her piece was learning about the impact that feedback can have on an individual’s sense of belonging, a deep connection that I hadn’t made. She writes that “the knowledge that what we do is meaningful and contributes to someone or something in a useful way for others, gives us a sense of purpose…”

This quote from the piece was what really put the value and important of feedback into perspective for me. Beyond just improving performance or fixing mistakes, feedback given to a person also lets that person know that they matter/are important, and that whoever/whatever is giving them the feedback cares about their success. The person receiving feedback, as a result, feels appreciated and acknowledged, leading to a stronger and deeper connection between the person and the provider of the feedback that is beneficial to everyone.

Feedback is powerful, underappreciated, and near effortless to take advantage of. Phrases like “What you did is good, but you could try doing this, too, to make it better” or “You’re doing a great job!” highlight how feedback can be so simple yet so effective, meaning there really isn’t an excuse to not give any!

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