As an international company,Kemira mainly focuses in offering services within the water intensive-industries sector. Their clients get the best knowledge in terms of making their raw materials, water, and energy more efficient. As a company, they mainly centralize on the mining and water treatment, oil and gas and paper and pulp respectively. The company has a mission statement that stresses on efficient use and reuse of water.
Their code can be defined as one that is result driven since all their objectives mainly centralize around company progress. Their code revolves on their main principles and values that mainly guide the daily behavior and decision-making bodies at the company that all work together for the general advancement of the company main objectives.These recurrent values include:
- Stressing on customer success
- Dedication to care for the habitat and the people
- Pride in joint success
- Initiation of innovation and performance
The company’s code in relation to the employees helps establish the way they should work, and it affects all the staff regardless of their workstations or rank. For the employees it helps set limiters and guidelines for all the business conduct aspects, for example, inappropriate behavior, embezzlement, fraud or any other violation. Inaddition,the code works as an outline that guarantees the workers comply with regulations as stipulated under the OECD set principles that Kemira is under.
The code helps keep the managers accountable for their actions since they are tasked with ensuring transparency, integrity, and honesty within their daily tasks. Over extension of the company, resources can be experienced if unethical managers are left to reign free in a business capacity thus the code is in place.
The principles and values presented are offered with various operational examples of the very types of ambiguities and dilemmas that an individual board of director member might encounter during their work. Forexample, in the definition of how the board isexpected to act fair on issues of conflicts, independence among other problems.
The issues identified within the current code include it not having clearly stipulated objectives, and not having much written on the company ethical principals and mission. As it is, the information is still understandable but I would recommend making the code more detailed and well structured than it is currently.
This is achieved by first starting the code with the introduction part introducing the company’s mission along with its main principles. In addition, define what, the code offers and the type of situations it applies. Thirdly delve more on the ethical principles and values of the company. Lastly, what the workers and organization should offer in terms of the stated values.
Understanding that both the management and employees respond differently it is obvious that the introduction of the changes will solicit both negative and positive feedback that might include anger and fear from employees and excitement, ambivalence and enthusiasm from the management. The organizational culture has a great impact on the employees since if embraced positively it has financial benefits for the company and in addition, it promotes ethical behavior, employee retention, and general productivity.
Even though some improvements were recommended for the Kemira code, in a sense it still stands as a comprehensive and essential item for successful operation of the company. The Kemira ethics code is realistic, but there is stillroom for development and improvement
Reference
Weiss, J. W. (2009). Business Ethics: A Stakeholder and Issues Management Approach With Cases (5 ed.). Mason, OH:: South-Western Cengage Learning.