Unethical Activities in Organizations
Today, almost every organization has employees who participate in unethical activities for a variety of motives ranging from personal gain to garnering the company's support. According to study, some businesses have made it their operational policy to take shortcuts, accept and offer kickbacks in order to obtain better contracts and maximize earnings (\"The Consequence of Unethical Business Behavior,\" 2011). In recent years, a slew of scandals involving unethical corporate practices have rocked a number of global organizations, including Wells Fargo, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, and Volkswagen, to mention a few. In one of the worst accounting scandal of the century, Toshiba Corp’s top management was found guilty of pressuring its workers to achieve ambitious profit targets by a third-party panel.
Corporate Culture and Unethical Conduct
The Toshiba’s scandal exposes ways in which closed corporate culture still plagues corporate governance at global companies. In every company, employees have rights created to protect them from detrimental treatment from their superiors. Therefore, organizations are expected to control as well as manage all forms unethical conduct. On the contrary, Toshiba encouraged a corporate culture that did not allow subordinates to oppose their superior. Moreover, the organization was criticized for being excessively focused on producing numbers. If not adequately addressed the unethical dealings can build a workplace culture of fear, which causes hesitation, stress, prevent employees from reaching their potential and may subsequently cripple the organization. Therefore, a training intervention is required to eliminate the toxic work culture.
Training Program for Ethical Behavior
The students for the training program will include the company accountants and top management officials. At the end of the program, the subordinates should be able to act ethically without fear of being retaliated against by the superiors. On the other hand, the superiors will acquire better leadership skills. Among the many instructional strategies that are available, this program will use lectures to engage the students with the content and allow them to meet the objectives. This approach will be appropriate because it promotes understanding through explanations, responds to student misconception and creates interest in a new area.
Using Media and Collaborative Learning
According to research, people learn new concepts more quickly when the lecture is presented in verbal as well as visual forms ("Why Use Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning," 2012). In addition to that, the media makes the content more accessible to people for future reference. In this case, a computer installed with the latest presentation software will be needed to augment lectures with slides, outlines, images and video clips. In addition to printing the lectures as handouts, they will be saved in a web-compatible format for future review and discussion. The company being technology-based is expected to have most of the resources like the computers and software required to complete the project.
Next, the intervention will employ collaborative learning, which will involve the students working together to solve the problem. Ideally, the exercise will be based on the concept that learning is a natural social act in which the students talk among themselves. In the collaborative environment, the students will be challenged both emotionally and socially when listening to the different perspectives. With this form of learning, the learners will be able to both articulate and defend their ideas. Further, to avoid interfering with the normal program of the company the training will be conducted on weekdays from 8 pm to 10 pm and on Saturdays from 9 am to 4 pm.
Assessing Learning and Performance
The students learning and performance will be assessed using concept maps. Instructing the students to create concept maps at different points throughout the course will provide the lecturer with insight on how to organize and present the knowledge. At the beginning of the session, the concept will provide an insight of the misconceptions and assumptions that the participants have, which will be used as a reference when assessing the overall knowledge gained.
Implementation and Evaluation
In the development stage, the data collected from the analysis and design stage will be used create a program that relays the student needs. This phase will entail creating and evaluation of learning outcomes. Next, the implementation stage will reflect the continuous improvement of the program to ensure positive results and maximum efficiency. During this phase, good note-taking will help the students recall information that can easily be forgotten weeks or months later. Students will be taught on taking, making, interacting and reflecting on the notes.
Accordingly, the students will be required to listen and note down the lectures in own words, something they can understand rather than jotting the verbatim of what they hear or see. In note making, the students will exchange ideas with colleagues to check for understanding and evaluate each other’s notes for comprehensiveness. Next, the learning will be linked by summarizing the work to address the issues that may arise.
Importance of Training and Development
Adequate training plays a crucial role in determining the efficiency of a company which depends on the capacity of the employees (Kunche, Puli, Guniganti, & Puli, 2011). Even though the training evaluation is listed the last, it will be conducted in all the stages to evaluate the effectiveness of the training process. First, the trainees will be provided with an electronic survey at the end of the session to measure how the participants reacted to the training. The students will also be interviewed four months after the training is over to determine knowledge acquisition. This step will also flag the areas that may need additional training.
Continuous Improvement and Business Benefits
Thirdly, the evaluation will attempt to determine whether the learners are applying their knowledge. To do so, the dissatisfaction complaints filed before the training will be compared with those submitted after the program. As a measure of business improvement will be measured, the accountants and other subordinates should be able to speak up about mistakes, but more importantly, the managers should be willing listen, acknowledge and share their mistake. It is noteworthy that the training techniques will be adjusted according to the evaluation results to capitalize on favorable outcomes.
Toshiba’s accounting malpractice once resolved could save the company the estimated $1.22 billion for over nearly seven years. Therefore, for one year, the company will manage to save $174 million. The training costs for each employee will be $10,000. Such costs will include development costs, direct implementation costs, compensation for the participants and lost productivity during training. Assuming Toshiba trains 1000 employees, the total training cost will be $10,000,000. This figure gives a rate of investment of 1640. The fact that the company will be getting a return of $16.4 for every dollar spent on training shows that training will be practical.
Integration of Training into Organizational Culture
Employee development is part of a good management and risk management strategy. Accordingly, organizations are recommended to integrate training and learning with the organizational culture. Moreover, companies should support learning with the necessary resources, encourage learning at different levels and constitute a policy on training and development. With these suggestions, scandals like Toshiba fraud case will be a thing of the past. Despite the potential challenges, training provides the company as well as the employees with benefits that render the time and cost a worthwhile investment.
References
Kunche, A., Puli, R. K., Guniganti, S., & Puli, D. (2011). Analysis and evaluation of training effectiveness. Human Resource Management Research, 1(1), 1-7.
The Consequence of Unethical Business Behavior. (2011). Six Sigma Online Training Certification Information. Retrieved 30 April 2017, from http://www.sixsigmaonline.org/six-sigma-training-certification-information/the-consequence-of-unethical-business-behavior/
Why Use Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning. (2012). Using Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning. Retrieved 30 April 2017, from https://serc.carleton.edu/econ/media/why.html
