Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility in the Hospitality Sector
Enterprises in modern societies, worldwide, are encouraged to operate and act in a socially responsible manner and go beyond basics and legal requirements in order to respond to their customers’ needs, in the most efficient way.
Business ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are philosophies that emphasize in the proper day-to-day organizations’ operations, with respect to the needs, requirements and expectations of the customers and market stakeholders.
What is Business Ethics?
Business ethics is a system of moral principles applied in the commercial world. Additionally, Business Ethics is a frame of applied ethics that examines ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that may arise in a business environment and provide guidelines for acceptable behavior by organizations in a strategic approach. An ethical approach is becoming essential for both corporate success and positive corporate image, and, applies to all aspects of business conduct and interaction of individuals and business organizations as a whole.
Business ethics consist of a set of moral principles and values that govern the behavior of the organization with respect to what is right and what is wrong. It spells out the basic philosophy and organizational priorities in concrete terms. It also includes the prohibitory actions at the workplace. It provides a framework based on which, the organization could be legally and efficiently governed.
What is CSR?
Corporate Social Responsibility defines all the cases of ethics that businessmen should effectively follow. Many organizations choose to make a public commitment to ethical business by formulating codes of conduct and operational principles. In doing so, they must transfer into action the concepts of personal and corporate accountability, corporate giving and corporate governance.
According to the European Commission, Corporate social responsibility (CSR) refers to companies taking responsibility for their impact on society. As evidence suggests, CSR is increasingly important to the competitiveness of enterprises. It can bring benefits in terms of risk management, cost savings, access to capital, customer relationships, human resource management, and innovation capacity.
The need for Business Ethics and CSR in the Hospitality Sector
Due to the continually changing competitive environment, the tourism sector and the hospitality industry are enforced to come up with new ideas so as to move ahead of the competitors by promoting advanced services and innovation.
Hospitality and tourism organizations respond to nowadays challenges by creating collaborative relationships and enhanced communication with their consumers. Widely it has been evidenced that enterprises following ethical and sustainable principles, generate long-term benefits.
Moreover, ethical issues in the hospitality sector arise from four main areas: the supply chain, the local community, the workplace, and, of course, customers. It is a common fact that there is a growing concern related to business ethics and the confrontation of ethical dilemmas in daily operations. Complex and interesting ethical issues affect this broad industry whose business ranges from restaurant operations to tourism-related business. Consequently, international tour operators intensively promote sustainability criteria in the selection of cooperating partners in hospitality and tourism services.
Managers often face accusations of theft, harassment, discrimination on the basis of age, gender, race and belief often leading to complaints that may result in lawsuits. The hospitality industry can also initiate considerable changes in the physical environment in words of organic and solid wastes produced by the hospitality industry.
The World Travel and Tourism Council clearly identified hospitality industry impacts as involving water consumption, energy consumption, chemical use and atmospheric pollution, purchasing and waste water management. According to World Tourism Organization (2002) responsible tourism is a form of tourism that relates all types of tourism with reverence to the destination, architectural, cultural and natural environment and the interests of all involved parties. This form of tourism reduces harmful environmental, social as well as economic impacts, while creating financial benefits for the hosting communities and enhancing the overall interest of the destination economy.
Thus, training towards Business ethics and CSR is of imperative need and value and it can adjust enterprises’ operation to the modern sustainability ethics and needs.
Learning objectives of the training program
- The training program focuses on the realization of the following objectives:
- Explanation and deepening in the meaning and components regarding Business Ethics and CSR
- Presentation of international CSR standards
- Adopt and implement international best practices on Business Ethics & CSR
- Oriented mindset and culture towards Business Ethics and CSR
- Development of corporate strategy
- Implementation of ethical values & principles (e.g. honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, loyalty, fairness, concern and respect for others, commitment to excellence, leadership, reputation and morale, accountability)
- Create a code of ethics in the hospitality sector
- Addressing economic, social, ethical and environmental challenges
- Improves customers’ management
- Barriers’ mitigation of and improving CSR growth conditions
- Increase satisfaction, engagement and employees’ productivity
- Strengthening communication and dialogue with stakeholders
- Promoting environmental friendly policies and use of natural and renewable energy resources
- Management of organic and solid waste
- Improvement of corporate image
- Instruction on how to issue social/sustainability reports