Introduction
Modern businesses make every effort to maintain and attract new customers in order to foster there growth and enhance the chances of profitability within there particular industries. They cannot achieve this objective unless they carry out there businesses within the provisions of commercial law in that particular country. There is also the requirement for these companies to be comply with there social responsibilities and employ ethical values in there business undertakings.
Hewlett Packard Company also known as HP is a technological company that was established in1939; the company has its headquarters in Palo Alto in California. Currently it has operations in over 170 countries world wide. The company mainly deals in making of personal computers, business computer systems, workstations, and printers together with scans. The company is geared towards producing technological products and services that satisfy the desires and dreams of the people. The company use new ideas to come up with simple, precious and trusted technology experiences, which has continued to improve the way customers’ lives and their works. Today HP is among the biggest companies in the world with a total of $97.1 billions in revenues posted in the year 2006 making the company to be the biggest technology dealer as far as sales were concerned. (Hewlett-Packard, 2007).
Business Ethics
Business ethics is defined as the norms or standards of behavior that guide moral choices about the conduct of the personnel in a business organization and the relationship with its publics. The goal of business ethics is to ensure the safety of the employees, management, and the external publics from suffering the consequences from the business activities of the particular organization.
The span of business ethics is extensive and can be measured from different perspectives. Here the company has recorded that its success has come up as a result of its social responsibility in ensuring that its workforce is provided with a working environment that makes them and the customers and other members related to the company. (Bagley and Savage 2006).
According to research we find that in the Hewlett Packard Company, trust and respect among the workers prevail making them the core values to its success. The company is also found to be passionate to its world wide customers; its performance is recorded to be of a high level of accomplishment and input and also working as a team whereby its workforce is encouraged to be honest and report what is found to strange happenings in the company whereby they are given an opportunity to communicate freely for them to have a clear information on the ethical concerns about the business. (Bagley and Savage 2006).
The company ensures better work force planning by proper selection and recruitment, offering orientation and induction to the new recruits, organizing trainings to develop and equip them with new skills. In addition the company is able to equip its employees with the latest technological tools which the employees use to achieve efficiency. This improves the technology of the company as more innovations are created.
Corporate communication is a process that is used to facilitate the exchange of information and knowledge of the enterprise with its internal and external publics or individuals that have a direct relationship with the organization. This practice is normally applied in the internal communications management as from the sharing of the knowledge to decision making with employees, suppliers, investors and the firms partners. The corporate communication is normally used to build the firm’s reputation among its stakeholders. This communication involves the following: change management, issue management, corporate social responsibility, crisis communication and internal relations.
The objectives of corporate communications is to inform and influence other people, promote policy change, raise funds, to monitor progress and to revise plans and to leave experience documented for the future of the firm. An enterprise needs a good internal communication system for it to build a consistent messages and analysis of its progress, to provide accurate and timely information to those who need it and to enable it develop an institutional memory and experience. in this case we find that Hewlett Packard company uses the HP Laboratories as its research arm which is meant to help in times of communication thus creating opportunities for the company globally an example of such laboratories of this company is the memory spot chip. (Bagley and Savage 2006).
The firm should also design management structures which help in the flow of information, meaning it should avoid overloading managers and expecting them to be the providers of information and lastly the firm should have written records including the assumptions that they make about their work this point makes it clear that one should not assume that everyone else in the company thinks in the same way he does whereby one should make sure that key decisions are recorded such as points of agreement reached during project meetings Firms face stiff competition and Hewlett Packard Company faces such competition in its business undertakings. With globalization businesses engage in unfair competition in order to increase there sales and in the process expand there business activities. Such practices are considered to be unethical for example in the process of this stiff competition firms may cut prices and sell there products way below there cost of production. This brings the aspect of unfair competition because firms with strong financial bases can withstand such strategies for considerable period of time unlike the young firms which does not have a lot of funds generated from there undertakings. (Hewlett-Packard, 2007).
The structure of the Hewlett Packard Company has the following; an established compliance council that is usually chaired by the chief Ethics and compliance officers including the chief privacy officer and the other leaders from the company the council’s responsibility is to ensure that the operation of the business globally comply with the laws and regulations whereby, its core objective is to ensure the of the supply of the products to compliance areas in the company. It also carries a risk assessment in areas prone to business risks whereby, the company also comes up with an action plan to resolve such risks.
While the privacy officers in the company play an important rule including that of reviewing the company’s investigative processes which takes care of the privacy matters related to the business of the company. In this case we find that the person who is in charge of the data included in the business and its ethics which supervises protection of the company’s data, including the policies and regulations, laws processes that should be adhered to. (Bagley and Savage 2006).
Legal Applications
Any business must operate within the law set forth in any country. This laws guide each and every business undertaking and how particular companies interrelates with others in the market place. Hewlett Packard Company is operating a legal business which is fully formed following the Company’s Act. Hewlett Company is a business that falls under information technology industry and therefore the law provides that it is not illegal to carry on such a business. As understood in legal theory a company means an organization of a number of persons for some common purpose or agenda. Such an association or a company may be created for the reasons of sharing profits in which event business enterprise or an undertaking can be embarked on through a business partnership or an incorporated body referred to as a company. Hewlett Packard Company is a registered company which is created under the Company’s Act and it is company limited by shares. This implies that the members of the Company have the responsibility to always share the profits or losses that arise in the course of the business for example through dividends to members. (Hewlett-Packard, 2007).
The Company is similar to any other lawful body; the company is a legal entity apart from its members who are only entitled to some rights, privileges and duties. We can therefore deduce that the Company became animated with span of life immediately when the concerned registrar of companies in the country validated its certificate of incorporation by approving it legal existence.
In this case we find that in year 2006 the company’s investigation had a case of a leakage into the confidential information about the business from the directors who spoilt its name. We find this organization came up with ways to resolve such conflicts. To maintain its leadership the company had to sign a contract with the Attorney General of California who was therefore under the obligation to resolve the civil claims that came up as a result of the leaking of the investigation, through this the company was committed to employ a number of actions to ensure that the internal investigation of the company is done accordingly with the California law and the company’s’ ethical standards. Due to this the company has therefore come up with a an investigator procurement program that is meant to deal with the following areas in the company administration; the investigative consultants’ qualifications, responsibility, management and the assessment of the investigators performance with a goal of ensuring that the code of ethics on investigations are adhered to accordingly. (Hewlett-Packard, 2007).
The company therefore works hand in hand with the Sarbanes –Oxley compliance which is an act that highly supports the outsourcing strategy whereby, the company believes that the outsourcing provides support in its compliance responsibility. This act has provided this company with the most important business challenges whereby its internal control certification privacy and data information, therefore we find that the company is provided with a white paper whose role is that it elaborates automated controls that has enabled the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance the automation basically include the combination of the Hewlett Packard Information Technology Service management, the HP open view and the frameworks of its structure which usually enables other companies to adhere to the rules implied by the Sarbanes-Oxley act which is normally understood as the study that is used to tackle the complexities that are supposed to meet the governments necessities of the law that is widely known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act (Hewlett-Packard, 2007).
Corporate Compliance and Social responsibility
Business ethics along with social responsibility defines what the organization ought to do in the management of the business. The social responsibility of a business organization towards the society merits considerations in all the faces of strategic management, whereby the organization must exercise strategic planning through environmental and organizational appraisal in order to provide answers to what an organization might do and what it can do. (Bagley and Savage 2006).
Another ethical issue in business is the social reaction of the organization that is the manager should create a positive work place that will have its employees engage and encouraged to attain high performances. He may do this by setting the right expectations from each department of the organization; he should encourage the workers into productive work by rewarding the best performance through raising of the payment by recognition of the workforce applied by the employee. For the firm to maximize the individual performance the manager should have job security concerns for his employees, under which when an employee is confident of his or her job security at the workplace, his performance is far much better than a case where he or she is not sure of being retained in the next year
Here we find that the Hewlett Packard Company carry the environmental responsibility with a strategy to produce products that are meant for the environment at large through this we find that the company ensures that its products are supplied and operated in a manner that won’t affect any part of the world. HP is recorded to have met the target of recycling one billion bounds of electronics including the toner and ink cartridges whereby in the year 2006 the company was able to recover more than 150 million pounds of electronics compared to its competitors in the market.
Conclusion
HP Company has managed to be where it is now because it has been able to effectively utilize the human resource and technology. For HP resource is an issue that the company gives great concern. Thus, the company has effectively and efficiently managed well the human resource, and technology issues, and this can be ascertained by the factor that today HP is the world leader in technology beating big players like IBM. Looking at the company objectives which states that; the company performance depends on motivated employees, an stimulating and exciting work environment is important for invention and that the company believes that each employee have something different to contribute to the company, it is true that the company has been able to follow its objective and produce highly innovative workforce that has kept coming up with new ideas. (Hewlett-Packard, 2007).
HP has continuously been able to grow and develop because of proper and good organization management. It is clear that for any company to be successful it has to have structures that are well coordinated. Human resource management in HP is well done and also emphasizes is put on technology, as it leads to more new products being invented. Managers and leaders within HP have an obligation to further propel the company forward thus able to create and maintain a healthy organizational culture within itself if they stick to the above mentioned roles and strategies All the same as co-founder of HP Mr. Dave Packard says, it is important for people to work together to be efficient and achieve targets. (Hewlett-Packard, 2007).
Reference
Bagley, C. & Savage, D. (2006): Managers and the legal Environment: Strategies for the 21st Century (5th edition, Thomson/West).
Hewlett-Packard, (2007): Development and Management in HP. Web.