Working with ethical businesses ensures you'll be working with teams that are committed to making positive change in the world. Here are six tips to find ethical businesses to work with toward common goals.
1. Look for Customer-Focused Organizations
A customer-centric focus is one of the key priorities of an ethical organization. If customers are at the center of the organization's interest, it's more likely to be interested in treating customers fairly, supporting them and building trusting, mutually beneficial relationships. Customers want to be treated like people, and many customers are interested in goals or activities working toward achieving concepts such as combatting climate change, sourcing ingredients or materials ethically, and helping those in need. You should look for organizations that put customer interests, needs, and wants before all else.
2. Use Search Tools
You can find many websites that rate the quality of various organizations' codes of ethics. These sites can do much of your research work for you. You can look up a brand or business and find information on that organization's basic code of ethics, how transparent it is about its sourcing, business practices, and treatment of employees and customers. You can also find in-depth analyses regarding these ethics. For example, if a beauty company claims one of its products is cruelty-free but you think other products it sells may have been tested on animals, you can use one of these sites to try to confirm whether you're correct or not.
3. Check the Depth and Transparency of the Organization's Ethics Code
Most organizations will have a publicly available code of ethics for consumers and business partners to review. When you're considering an organization to work with, you should carefully review its code of ethics and compare the code to what you've discovered about the organization's practices and methods to see if they match. If they don't you may not be dealing with a highly ethical organization. You can then decide whether to decline to work with that business or to do more research and see if there's a reason for the discrepancy.
4. Be Active in Your Community
Community activism can help you connect with like-minded organizations, particularly small local businesses. You can spend time and energy building bonds with these organizations, getting to know the people who run and work for them and learning about these organizations' ethical cores and codes. You can improve your networking skills and branch out to create programs that will help your community with these organizations.
5. Do Your Own Research
In the modern world, it's easy to learn about the reputations and company cultures of most organizations. You can check their social media presences, do an internet search to learn about the impact an organization has made on its stated ethical goals, and find testimonials from current and former customers and employees. Check the company's website to see how it describes itself and how that description compares to what others are saying. Ask your professional network about their experiences with the organization.
6. Look for Organizations That Share Your Values
One of the easiest ways to narrow down your choices for an ethical organization to work with is to look for organizations that share your values. You'll likely have the easiest time working with an organization long-term if your values are aligned. Making this your first step will make sure you don't do all the research on an organization only to find out your values don't align, rendering all that time and energy wasted. Come up with a list of ethical requirements and nice-to-haves. Then, look for organizations that list and seem to embody those ethical values as part of their company cultures.
You should seek out businesses whose codes of ethics align with your ethical interests and the problems you see in the world that you want to change. Doing so will help your relationship with these businesses get off on the right foot and ensure your relationship is solid and mutually beneficial.
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