Business and entrepreneurship

 

             Each organization develops rules and policies that reflect its vision and mission of establishment, values, and culture. The same rules and policies are also vital because it enables the management authority to understand the need of their workers and customers. Once such policies and rules are in place, enforcing them in the right way is also important. Despite that, accomplishment of such goals can also be tougher task than it really sounds. The following are some of the best practices which can be adopted by an organization to develop better rules and policies

Best practices for developing organization policies

1. a) Identify need – an organization should to make constant assessment of its responsibilities, activities, and the nature of external environment so as to have the capacity of identifying the need for policies.
2. b) Identification of who will be taking lead responsibility – an organization should ensure that it has delegate responsibilities to a particular working group, staff members, sub-committee, or an individual according to the expertise or skills needed.
3. c) Information gathering – although the organization might be having legal responsibilities, it is paramount to ensure that concerned individuals have clear understanding of the guidelines needed to develop certain policies. That will take into account the gathering information from other organization regarding the strategies to use in developing policies.
4. d) Consulting with appropriate stakeholders – organization policies can be more effective in case constant consultations are made with those its effects. In return, it will be easier to discuss best ways to apply such a policy once it has been implemented.
5. e) Implementing, monitoring, reviewing, and revising the policies – after implementing formulated policies, it is important to monitor whether its reporting systems are up-to-date. The same take into account the need to review its usage and/or responses.

Best practices for developing organization rules

1. a) Write them – an organization should ensure that they have written in a format that can be easily understood by each person. It is important to collaborate with all stakeholders so as to ensure that the best views of each person have been captured.
2. b) Tailor it- it paramount to ensure that rules have been tailored in a manner that can provide specific information that are pertinent to the enterprise. The same strategy will take into account the importance of analyzing the problems being faced regularly so as to better formulate rules.

A rules-code is ideal for tailoring information. An organisation should consider the specific problems it faces repeatedly and include them in the code, using short scenarios or cases of actual situations as illustrations. Generic codes should be avoided since they often are token substitutes for creating a culture of ethical business.

3. Communicate it. Implementation is an open process and a code should be communicated to all internal and external stakeholders. Distribute it to all members of the organisation as well as clients, and do so regularly.

4. Promote it. Go beyond communication and promote it actively in multiple languages, using every opportunity to proclaim it to all stakeholders. Methods or vehicles of promotion are: laminated cards, business cards, brochures, official documents, framing and displaying, posting on a website. Promotion signals that ethics matters to the organisation, that values shape its culture.

5. Revise it. Developing a code is an evolutionary process. A code should be revised or reviewed every few years, because of changing worldwide conditions, evolving community standards, and developing organisational policies. This does not mean that ethics is purely relative to our whims or preferences, only that its specific demands should be sensitive to changing realities.

6. Live it. The litmus test for any code is whether members of the organisation follow it on a daily basis. If it is properly communicated, promoted and revised, it is more likely to become a living document.

7. Enforce and reinforce it. Enforcement and reinforcement are critical to gain respect from stakeholders, internal and external. For shorter values-codes, reinforcement should be the policy of choice. For longer, rules-codes, it should be enforcement, specifying rewards and punishments, which are indeed carried out. Sanctions should be proportional to the severity of the ethical transgression. For example, padding an expense account by a small amount is not as severe as accepting a substantial bribe or kickback.