Ethics And Integrity: Stepping Stones To Success And Sustainability

CEAI has worked to improve the quality of engineering supplied by consulting companies in India over the course of its sixty-year history. It provides service to the Engineering Consulting Industry by organizing capacity-building workshops, training programs, and seminars. CEAI also highlights its Code of Ethics, which acts as a framework and direction for consulting firms, in order to improve the legitimacy of the engineering consultancy profession.

Ethics And Integrity: Stepping Stones To Success And Sustainability

Ethics And Integrity advocate ethical practices among the consulting fraternity. It enhances your credibility in the profession and will prove to be indispensable for the success and longevity of your organization. Ethical conduct relates to oneself at a personal level and at an organizational level, it relates organizational own procedures with respect to its employees and stakeholders and while rendering services to its customers. It necessitates compliance with ethical business practices and attributes like transparency, integrity, trustworthiness, accountability, adherence to quality, timeliness, codes and standards, and contractual commitments. If we look around we will find that invariably the biggest and best brands and the long-lasting successful companies are those that have been ethical in their practices and have the trust of their customers.

Like many other professions whether it is a medical profession or professional accounting profession, ethics and integrity is the first thing we place before we start our business. To uphold and advance the ethics and integrity of the engineering profession a code has been adopted by most engineering professionals and societies around the globe. In the past conflict between self-interest and public interest was seldom a problem for engineers. Today, environmental issues have created a divergence between self-interest, employee interest professional interest, and public interest. Therefore, the reality is to expect engineers to display higher ethical standards than those normally expected of the wider community.

Ethics

Ethics play a significant role in influencing technologies that are collectively shaped by professionals’ paradigms and philosophies. Modern engineering codes of ethics require engineers to put the public interest first. Most engineering codes of ethics state that engineers should hold paramount the health and safety of the public and the community as a large.

Ethics provide the framework for the set of moral principles, a framework mutually accepted by the system one works in while integrity is a personal value, the quality of being honest is the very fabric that one is made of. Ethics can be codified into a set of accepted rules but integrity is an individual quality, a personal moral code. Together they constitute the reason why society can still subsist and survive with a large amount of predictability else we would be living in a state of anarchy and perpetual chaos.

Integrity: Doing the right thing

Integrity is the heart of anti-corruption activity. Integrity said author C.S. Lewis, “is doing the right thing, even when no one is looking.”  Integrity is a foundational moral virtue and the bedrock upon which good character is built. Acting with integrity means understanding, accepting, and choosing to live in accordance with one’s principles, which will include honesty, fairness, and decency.

A person of integrity will consistently demonstrate good character by being free of corruption and hypocrisy. Integrity is revealed when people act virtuously regardless of circumstance or consequences. This often requires moral courage. Indeed, integrity is the critical connection between ethics and moral action.

Integrity for engineers includes four simple steps which include:

• Leadership
• Involvement
• Documentation
• Monitoring

Integrity basically means standing up to what you believe is right and living by your highest values.

Success: Expansion of happiness in your life

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do and how you do it. More precisely, it means the continued expansion of happiness in your life. It is the courage, determination, and the will to become the person you believe to be. Success is the state or condition of meeting a defined range of expectations.

There are no shortcuts to success because success is compound interest. It’s the accumulation of many smaller efforts over a period of time

Sustainability: Harmony with nature

Sustainability is the concern for profitability in harmony with the environment and social commitment. Sustainability refers to the ability to maintain or support a process continuously over time. In business and policy contexts, sustainability seeks to prevent the depletion of natural or physical resources, so that they will remain available for the long term.

Accordingly, sustainable policies emphasize the future effect of any given policy or business practice on humans, ecosystems, and the wider economy. The concept often corresponds to the belief that without major changes to the way the planet is run, it will suffer irreparable damage.

Sustainable development means “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs,” according to the Brundtland Commission. Sustainability is often broken into three core concepts or “pillars”:

• Economic
• Environmental
• Social

Many businesses and governments have made commitments to long-term goals like lowering their environmental footprints and conserving resources. Green investments are being aggressively pursued by some investors. Some corporations have been accused of “greenwashing,” the process of misleading the public to make a business appear more environmentally friendly than it actually is.

If you found this article insightful, head over to the Consulting Engineers’ Association of India’s (CEAI) website for more such useful content.