With the advent of the Internet, everything from personal relationships to business has become ‘global’ for all intents and purposes. Today, you can talk to people from all over the world just as easily as if you were talking to your next-door neighbor. Businesses can exchange documents of all kinds with the push of a button, without having to wait days and often weeks for those documents to be delivered by hand. We are global, and this has had a profound effect in the area of business ethics.
What we need to realize is that what may be considered ethical in our own country is not necessarily so in another country. This often makes doing global business quite difficult. At a time when we didn’t have the internet, it was more a matter of not accidentally disrespecting the customs and traditions of others. However, today, the stakes are much higher. Nor should you trample on the ethical code of other companies, or countries, while remaining true to the ethical code of your own company or country.
The first step is to understand the business traditions and customs of the country in which the company you are dealing with resides. Hopefully they will do the same for you, making an effort to learn about your traditions and business customs. Next, you need a way to communicate clearly. In this area of the global market, hiring the services of a talented translator is essential. You need to clearly know what they are saying, and they also need to know what you are saying. Don’t rely on your high school semester of a foreign language to get you through this.
Global businesses also have a profound effect on their employees. For example, if you do business with a foreign country that only maintains regular business hours, in your time zone, one or more of your employees will need to be available for phone calls and so on, when it is convenient for the foreign company. Do you expect your employees to be in the office to take those calls or make those teleconferences at midnight, and expect them to arrive early the next morning? That’s not very ethical.
Another area that has become a growing concern when it comes to global business and ethics is reporting income from foreign countries. If your business makes a sale to a business in Canada, for example, that sale will not be reported to the IRS in the United States by the business you sold to or the Canadian government. It is not, by anyone’s standards, ethical not to report that income to the IRS yourself.
In many countries, bribing officials is part of doing business. However, this does not make the practice ethical, and experts advise business owners to inform all their employees that such practices will not be tolerated when conducting business globally, or even when conducting business in their own country.
Global business is seemingly easy with the use of the Internet, but in the grand scheme of things, when you begin to see what is and is not acceptable or expected in a foreign country, in terms of ethical business practices, one must use a lot of precautionary
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