What Professional Ethics Means
Ethics, integrity, law and company rules: how they differ and how they fit together.
9 min
Activities: 0 of 2
Every working day contains small choices. Do you record the real time you finished a job, or round it up? Do you tell your manager that the test was not done, or let the report go out anyway? Do you accept the supplier’s offer of a free weekend trip? Most of these choices are never seen by anyone else. Professional ethics is about how you make them.
Ethics is the study and practice of what is right and wrong, good and bad, fair and unfair. Professional ethics applies those ideas to work: how we treat the people we serve, the organisation we work for, our colleagues and the public.
Integrity means being whole and consistent. A person with integrity acts on the same principles whether or not someone is watching, and their words and their actions match. Integrity is not about being perfect. It is about being honest, keeping your commitments and putting things right when you get them wrong.
This course is awareness training for every employee and new team leader. It is not a legal course and it does not award any professional qualification.
Four things that are often confused
Rules made by the state, with penalties if you break them. The law sets the minimum. Something can be legal and still wrong, for example misleading a customer with a technically true statement.
Why "it is not illegal" is not enough
Laws change slowly and differ from country to country. A company may work in several countries at once. Many situations at work are not covered by any law at all: how you speak to a junior colleague, whether you share credit for a team result, whether you tell a client about a small defect. In these situations, your ethics and your company’s code are the only guide.
A useful way to think about it: the law tells you what you must not do; ethics asks what you should do.
A sales employee tells a customer that a product "meets all requirements", knowing that it fails one test the customer cares about. No law was broken. What is the best description?