Issue Being Addressed: Engineering companies are at the forefront of technical problem solving across all domains. However, due to modern business practices and focus on capital growth to please shareholders rather than the wider communities, the societal betterment may not be a part of their overall strategy or be only mentioned to fulfill Public Relations (PR) obligations. This can be seen in situations where ethics and morals have been thrown out in the pursuit of capital. For example, Cambridge Analytica’s Revelations with Facebook (now Meta)’s data breach and Spotify’s recent action regarding Joe Rogan’s Spread of COVID-19 related misinformation. In both these cases, there were instances where there were differing opinions among the top-brass about various approaches that lead to conflicts, poor PR and reduced morale of the employees.
How do we tackle harmful business practices in engineering companies and change the thinking of boardrooms to a more ethical mindset?
The proposal is to create a training module that includes and promotes “Ethical Best Practices” among the Senior Management of Tech Companies to encourage open discussion, hearing voices across the company for a holistic growth of the company. This training module will be first advertised to External organizations like EWB to reach a wider audience of Technology Companies.
Quantifying Success:
After a certain time-frame (annually) of conducting the Training, the company will be responsible for delegating an Ethics Champion or Group to evaluate Company progress towards promoting SDGs and report annually.
Benefit: By promotion of ethical values and practices, companies investing in these would feel the benefit from a more positive work environment for employees, greater PR recognition as a force for good through association with a professional institution “seal of approval”. These will directly impact on growth and cost saving by creating a company more sought after to work for and engage with and also reduce turnover of staff.
You might want to look at some programmes that already exist - like "considerate contractors scheme" or the various league tables about the best place to work.
Let me know if you want to chat about these ideas so far...
I will think about this more - but don't forget to re-read the marking criteria. Check you are addressing every issue!
My third comment is about what do you meant by ethics? Is this general good professional conduct (which is requirement of being professionally qualified). Is it meeting certain standards in our society, or is there something about engineering that needs a greater awareness of ethics. Medical ethics is a "thing". Is there such as "thing" as engineering ethics that makes it different from normal acceptable behaviour?
My next comment is about your audience. Is this really aimed at engineers or at management boards. Many engineering companies are providing a service or product for someone else. They are client-led. What makes your proposal different from working with any company? You could be talking about banks or supermarkets.
Here's a few comments on my initial impressions.
You've identified public relations as your driver for change. How strong is this driver? People are still using Facebook and Spotify, so the recent issues do not seem to be strong enough to make radical and rapid change. Will ethical awareness just make people better at hiding and spinning bad publicity? I'm not saying that you are working, I'm just asking for stronger evidence. We have lots of evidence of the need for diversity in workforces and even legislation, but progress is is slow there.