Organizational Philosophies and Technology Paper Essay - 2

Organizational Philosophies and Technology Paper - Essay Example 1). A company's approach to the use of technology to help set and manage ethical standards and guidelines can have a tremendous influence on the type of work environment or culture a company promotes. The extent to which there is an overall laid back attitude toward ethics, or a serious one, or the extent to which employees feel trusted and comfortable in their work environment, all has a lot to do with a company's decisions about how it chooses to deploy technology to establish and maintain ethical behavior. Businesses must tread carefully when making these decisions, for they risk unintended repercussions that might result from an overly zealous attempt to manage employees' ethical behavior, such as low morale and job satisfaction that lead to reduced productivity and costly turnover. In addition to managing ethical guidelines, companies today are increasingly turning toward technology in order to perform human resources functions. Many of the administrative aspects of human resources have become automated and transformed into self service functionality by technology. These include management of such routine HR activities as benefits and leave management. This too can have an impact on company culture by forging an atmosphere of high efficiency and cutting edge capabilities, or else can lead employees to feel isolated without personal HR service. Ultimately, whether a company chooses to deploy technology as a means of monitoring employee activities and behavior, or to facilitate their execution of routine functions, the potential repercussions must be weighed against to anticipated benefits of such technology. Unfortunately, the former are often not as easy to predict as the latter. Setting Ethical Standards via Technology "The need to address ethics in companies that deal with information technology has increased over the past several years as more and more transactions are handled using information systems" (Stanwick & Stanwick, 2001, para. 2). Technology has raised employee ethical concerns in the areas of property rights and obligations, policies pertaining to company proprietary as well as customer information, and employee privacy and monitoring (para. 5 - 9). Companies today are leveraging technology more than ever before to communicate expectations for performance and behavior to employees. Most companies have intranets containing a wealth of information regarding policies and procedures to which employees can refer when they have questions. For example, workers can often retrieve employee handbooks, review HR procedures and processes, view and make changes to tax information, benefits elections, and so forth. Online learning has become another key venue for communicating with employees about appropriate behavioral and performance expectations. In the wake of the corporate accounting scandals of a few years ago, many companies have required employees to take e-learning classes on how to ensure legal compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley. These types of courses often provide guidance on what to do when presented with various types of ethically challenging scenarios, and give the company an opportunity to clearly communicate ethical standards and guidelines to every employee. Technology has also given companies the ability to track