Your ethics profile gives you a clear picture of the risks and opportunities that ethics presents to your business. Now you need to set the priorities for your people to focus on.
This involves weighing up the impacts that different ethical issues could have on achieving your business objectives. That’s where the critical friend role that I’m often given helps firms to face up to challenging questions and create a clear set of priorities for the year ahead.
An ethics plan also needs to satisfy the same criteria as any other business plan – what resources are available for it and how can it fit into everything else the business is up to? That means making realistic judgements about what the business can achieve and by when. Here my many years of management experience in insurance will bring a pragmatism to weighing up these considerations.
Duncan is an independent adviser on business ethics, with a particular focus on the insurance and financial planning sectors. He worked in insurance for 18 years and has been an ethics adviser for 11 years. He's a Chartered Insurance Practitioner.