Category Archives: Ethics

11/15/13

Why are employees so important?

Google, which is regarded as the best workplace in the world, puts lots of effort on “creating a workplace people never want to leave”. For example, it creates a cozy environment for people to work in by providing many different places within the company such as gyms, micro kitchen. Besides, the company designs spaces with different scales that allows employees to design their own spaces. All these efforts aim at making employees feel more comfortable with their working environment.

Why is it so important for employees to feel good? Here’s what I think.

Good employee’ performance leads to more consumers. As many businesses strive to figure out ways to learn more about their consumers in order to gain more profit, they often forget the fact that it is employees who create the products that customers consume.

Employee is actually the other crowd that businesses should pay equal attention to. Today, however, there are still some companies don’t aware of that, and think that the money they saved from building a good working environment can help maximize their profit.

As employees have more rights than ever today, businesses have to realize that figure out appropriate ways to maximize their human resource such as providing good working environment is a very important thing to do to make the businesses more profitable; and they should.

 

Source:

How To Create  A Workplace People Never Want To Leave By Google’ s Christopher Coleman. (April 11 2013) Retrieved Nov. 15, 2013 from BloomBerg Business week: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-11/how-to-create-a-workplace-people-never-want-to-leave-by-googles-christopher-coleman

09/11/13

Business can create profits by being responsible for the society

I partially  agree with Friedman’s idea that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits within the rules of the game.” In an attempt to make more profits, firms would, for example try to lower the cost by make the best use of their limited resources or introducing new technologies which make their production more efficient. However, many business are using the conventional wisdom, in which they gain profit through causing social problems. For example, firms make profits through providing employees with poor working environment and resist environmentally improvement in order to save firms’ costs.

Personally, I think that business ethics could somehow push up business’ profits, and at the same time allow business to be socially responsible as it is mentioned in the passage: “Ethics give competitive edge”.

For instance, employees would improve their quality of service and be more productive when firms create comfortable workplaces for them. Moreover, it’s also a matter of fact that firms will be more efficient when there is no resource wasted. In addition, business can actually gain benefits by operating in an environmentally friendly way. It helps business to be more competitive, to operate in a sustainable way, and to focus on long-term growth that could create profits and make values for stakeholders.

Sources:

Bradwell M. Ethics Gives Competitive Edge (2013.9.10) http://allafrica.com/stories/201309100433.html?viewall=1

Michael P. Why Business Can Be Good at Solving Scoial Problems (2013.6.10) http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_porter_why_business_can_be_good_at_solving_social_problems.html