Participation and Action as a Global Citizen in the Workplace

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.