Question

Libbi Alberighi and Flavia van Peij are friends who work for the same company. Libbi manages a manufacturing department and Flavia supervises the payroll clerks. Which ethical guidelines or rules would these friends need to remember when discussing work? (You may select more than one answer.)

• Exercising personal integrity to avoid any apparent conflicts of interest would also be appropriate for these individuals.
• Avoid all contact with each other outside of professional settings.
• Digitally recording all conversations, with or without each other’s consent.
• Non-disclosure of confidential information they have over the employees in their areas of responsibility.

Answer 1

Following are the ethical guidelines or rules would these friends need to remember when they are discussing work:

Exercising personal integrity to avoid any apparent conflicts of interest would also be appropriate for these individuals

A conflict of interests (COI) means is a situation in which a person is involved in multiple interests, financial or otherwise, and serving one interest could involve working against another.In this case since for both the employees there is a personal interest in addition to their professional interest , they have to exercise utmost personal integrity in order to avoid any any apparent conflict of interest in order to fulfill their professional responsibilities in a manner that upholds the highest ethical standards that are expected from them as per the Code of Ethics. If this is not taken care of by the employees then that might compromise their ability to make professional judgements.

Non-disclosure of confidential information they have over the employees in their areas of responsibility.

In today’s increasingly competitive environment in the workplace, confidentiality is of utmost important for a lot of reasons:

If the organization fails to properly secure and protect the confidential business information then it can lead to the loss of clients thereby adversely affecting the business interest of the organization. Since both the friends are working for the same organization but in the different departments and each of the employees is responsible for the employees working in their area of responsibility , the disclosure of sensitive employee information and management information can lead to a loss of employee trust, can affect the employee’s confidence and loyalty adversely. This will also lead to or result in a loss of productivity.

Confidentiality of the employee information is important and it governs the confidentiality and disposal of “personal identifying information” ( like an employee’s Social Security number, home address or telephone number, e-mail address, password etc)