In this post we
will discuss the global citizenship in the workplace.
What is a
global corporate citizen?
A global
corporate citizen always try to place their work in a global context in order
to make the difference in the world. It is a person who always work respecting
the global ethics, their own ethics and the ethics of the company. So in the
first instance it seems hard because there are three kind of ethics, however
they are really close with each other. Another important characteristic of a
global corporate citizen is that they are engaged with a broad world, they have
a good awareness about different cultures and interconnections (tree of life).
What the
companies do for support that?
Most of the
companies have a special department called by Human Resources (HR) that cares
about their employees and the work place. The HR helps the company to show
clearly to the employees what are their goals and ideals, they also provide
courses in order to improve their employees as good citizens and also have more
knowledge about the world situation. Many companies also work in volunteer
programs with their employees, which is really good because it motivate people
to do good things without receive money, it is just for the humanitarian
improvement. Moreover, many companies realize that sometimes the knowledge can
come from outside the company, it means that the flexibility is an important
factor in regards to the global corporate citizen.
What kind of
action help to improve the global citizenship inside the workplace?
For answer this
question we will divide the actions in 4 areas that are shown below.
- Workplace
actions
The work place
must be composed by diversity, equal opportunity, respectful by the human
rights and good work environment.
- Governance
actions
The company
must have a code of conduct offered for the employees and also they must offer
a feedback to the employees in order to keep the motivation and conduct them
for the focus of the company, always working with ethics.
- Environment
actions
This area I
reckon that it is not necessary to explain deeper, because it is widely known
that every corporation that are following the principles of a global corporate
citizenship they must try to improve their efficiency and technology in order
to reduce the damage caused to the environment (e.g. greenhouse gas emissions).
- Community
and social actions
This is also an
important area that make the difference in the world. Most of the biggest
companies in the world have some programs related to the social pillar where
they give funds to community programs in order to help the poor people with
food, health and education. For example, the corporation ExxonMobil funded some
institutions in order to work against some diseases such as HIV/AIDS and
malaria in Africa.
During the
lecture of the block 9, they presented the company Cirque du Soleil as a good
global corporate citizenship because they offer programs such as every year
they give 1% of the company gross revenue into social and cultural action.
According to Daniel Lamarre (CEO and President of Cirque du Soleil) is not just
a commercial company but a company that has to play a major role as a global
citizen.
Therefore,
these actions above are how the companies can support corporate global
citizenship
Now we are going
to move to the Business Ethics.
What is
Business Ethics?
As we already
study in our last posts, the business ethics is the ethics applied to the
business. For instance, it is the right and wrong thing that we saw before.
How to be a
good professional with good values of global citizen?
Basically, in
nowadays to be a good professional and also a good global corporate citizen you
must have some characteristics such as respect by each other, efficiency in the
work place, awareness about the environment and equality between genders (no
discrimination).
Conclusion:
From my point
of view, I reckon that the principles of ethics can be applied to all human
activities where no business can be useful without ethics. Everyone, including
the employers, have their benefits with it, however, sometimes an ethical issue
will occur and it will be kind of hard to solve in an ethical manner, so you
must be able to solve it by use the ethical principles of your company and
never lost the mind when treating it.
