Ethics And Codes Of Conduct In The ICT And Engineering Sector In Australia

Importance of professional codes of conduct and ethics in the Engineering sector

Dicuss about the Professional Practice And Communication.

The report is prepared to discuss the ethical and codes of conduct issues related to the ICT or Engineering sector in Australia. Various secondary sources will be analyzed to obtain relevant information about the context and ensure providing judgments to analyze the outcomes, furthermore relate it to the ICT or engineering sector. One such issue can be the Hard Disk Disposal when the hard disk still has content and data. There is ethical and professional codes of conduct for such task because disposing a hard disk consisting of data and information can be risky and even may hinder the management of security and even result in loss of data. Disposing a content filed hard disk can often cause security issues and even important data and information may fall in wrong hands, which may cause other issues faced by the company. The Codes of conduct and ethics are to be maintained for ensuring maintaining a stable working environment and at the same time, prevent occurrence of these issues with ease and effectiveness (Fluor.com 2018). As the report presents detailed codes of ethics and conducts within the engineering sector, so Fluor Australia Pty Ltd, also known as Fluor Australia is considered as the case study that provides integrated engineering, procurement, construction and maintenance solutions for serving clients over Australia and Asia Pacific region.

The professional codes of conduct and ethics are important to be maintained within the workplace of the business organizations within the Engineering sector. The individuals working within the organization are focused on their individual profession, because of which, there has been increased importance of professional bodies and thus the codes of ethics and conduct have been revised and refined as well. Within the engineering of ICT sector, professionalism mean remaining competent, qualified, skilled and efficient while managing the codes of practices and ensuring that the rules, regulations and standards govern the moral codes of conduct (Blais 2015). A Code of behavior include the various policies, principles and expectations that are considered by a person while the ethical codes mean managing codes of business ethics, codes of conduct for the employees and maintaining the odes of professional practices. The Codes of ethics include the values, beliefs, strengthen the proficiency of Codes of conduct, and develop restrictions on certain aspects regarding behaviors and attitudes of employees at the company too. The ICT and Engineering sectors have managed to enforce codes of conduct and practices to ensure that the workers and staffs must follow the codes of conduct and ethics to preserve the integrity of the professional practice as well as maintain trust and loyalty (Forsetlund et al. 2009). This would prevent undermining the profession resulting from low ethical standards and the organization could achieve the standards to meet the needs and preferences of the customer easily. The practitioners within the ICT or engineering profession could contribute to a variety of domains that include both business and Government and even conceptualize the role of information and engineering systems for the future. It could not only help in maintaining professionalism, but would also implement effective information system solutions for improving the business performance. Due to the presence of good analytical and critical thinking skills among the engineering professionals, it should be equally important for them to exhibit the strong ethical policies and principles, which shall be needed for strengthening the interpersonal communication and team working skills (Danielson 2011).

Case study of Fluor Australia Pty Ltd

The case study demonstrated the emergence of ethical and codes of conduct related issues within the Engineering sector of Australia where there had been disposal of toxic wastes causing damage to the environment. There could be various engineering activities managed and these often produced a huge amount of waste including wastes from industrial activities, agricultural activities and during the residential buildings’ development. Same happened for Fluor Australia where wastes were generated from the construction sites, while repairing roads and during the renovation of site and destruction of buildings to create new ones (Cornelissen and Cornelissen 2017). The wastes included wood, steel, concrete, dust all over that could create pollution, and often those were being disposed into water bodies, causing enormous amount of pollution and harming the habitat and aquatic life too. The organizational processes consisting of the manufacturing and production of infrastructures often resulted in the disposal of toxic wastes. The power plants and machineries used for enhancing the engineering efficiency was the cause of emissions of harmful gases and pollutants, which also contributed to the negative environmental impact for Fluor Australia. According to the case study, it was found that the main causes of wrong disposal included not separating the solid wastes and hazardous wastes and keeping those solid wastes (Hollnagel 2013). The collection service provided by the company’s cleaning department did not pay any heed to cover the areas and dispose the wastes properly due to higher time consumption and effort. It was also because of lack of containers and proper availability of people to handle the wastes generated by the company Fluor Pty Ltd., Australia (Fluor.com 2018).

The Engineering company’s professional code of conduct are to comply with the laws, rules and regulations to approach the ethical issues in a proactive way, furthermore improve the efficiency of the ethics and compliance program by monitoring the evolvement of risks and benchmarking the best practices to meet the local and global needs of people. Fluor commits to do the right thing and has developed standards including the Codes of conduct and ethics for ensuring that the employees possess relevant tools, knowledge, skills and resources to maintain the laws, rules and regulations (Hargie 2016). The ethical and Codes of conduct implemented the company focused on creating lesser negative impact on the environment and thus made sure to dispose the wastes (Fluor.com 2018). The company managed the wastes though incineration and disposing those on dumping grounds so that less pollution should be created. The company, at the same time, supported the health, safety and welfare of the employees by maintaining better security and ensuring that they were provided with good working conditions. The ethical recruitment process was managed by preventing any forms of discrimination whereas the safe working practices improved the working conditions of employees and kept them safe and healthy to deliver the best work and gain appropriate outcomes (Resnik 2015).

Impact of discrimination on teamwork and coordination

Discrimination is a common issue often faced within the Engineering companies, due to which, a proper culture is not maintained and this often hinders the successful management of teamwork, coordination and deriving successful positive outcomes. This often involves not treating the male and female staffs equally, which will reduce the level of morale among the employees, furthermore take more time and effort to accomplish a task. The staffs might not feel interested and their performances would tend to deteriorate with the passing of time. They were not paid equally and often some employees were provided with better scopes and opportunities than the others, which would create conflicts and misunderstandings among the workers too (Egels-Zandén 2014). There was also presence of discrimination within the workplace due to which, many of the workers were not provided with the right amounts of wages and this created issues and conflicts, resulting in unequal scopes and opportunities provided to the male and female individuals working at Fluor Pty Limited, Australia. Administrative corruption was also experienced where bribes had been accepted to misinterpret the implementation of laws, rules and regulations (Fisher 2016). It was mainly experienced during the recruitment and selection processes when bribes were taken to gain access to the political factor and get a job at the company without much difficulty. While the other candidates needed to give exams and take part in the interview sessions, by giving bribes few of the candidates were provided with much better opportunities of employment and for winning tenders. Few of the other situations that could be related to the ethical and codes of conduct issues were technical incompetence, conflicts of interest, discrimination of employees based on race, religion, creed, color or ethnicity and inappropriate utilization of the resources too (Egels-Zandén and Merk 2014). Failing to protect the public health, safety and welfare of the employees along with wrong relationships with the clients and construction workers would result in inappropriate political and community involvement. Often important data and information were mishandled and this lead to loss of data for Fluor Australia, due to which the three might be failure to protect the environment as well. This further contributed to the lack of control and poor quality work at Fluor Pty Limited, Australia (Mamic 2017).

Within the ICT or Engineering sector, there could also be issues when there would be no common education program for the ICT workers and thus they might not be able to learn about the standards, laws, rules and codes of conduct. Due to the presence of few sanctions and minimal oversight and no threats of losing the ICT or engineering license, following the rules, regulations and codes of Conduct is important to maintain the organizational standards. Due to the rapid changing in  ICT or engineering environment, codes of conduct, laws, rules and regulations were not applied at the right times, which might result in fraud legislations during the global internet sales (Kennedy, Welch and Monshipouri 2017). The problem is related to the development of engineering concepts and during the construction of buildings and infrastructures. There could also be lack of communication considered as a major issue faced within the Engineering sector, which might prevent team working, coordination, and further increase the time consumption for a project and more resources should be required as well. There might even be disconnection between the construction individuals and the customers who might be skilled in their respective domains (Sthiannopkao and Wong 2013).

Issues faced within the Engineering sector

There were other situations where the resource were misused and due to this, sensitive data and information were lost, which might have cost a huge amount of money and effort to retrieve those back. The disposal of hard disk when there is still content left can be problematic and cause ethical issue, because it will lead to loss of information as well as prevent the security and authenticity of data. It is because, after disposing the hard disk, the content can be still recovered, in case it is deleted. There were researches and surveys that concluded that there were number of times when the content of the hard disk was recovered with ease and effectiveness (Davies 2016). If the hard disk is fully formatted, then also the data and information stored in it can be recovered with the use of special software.

One of the major ethical concerns is the confidential data and information within the hard disk can cause security risk as long as it is there. Other than the size, the companies that handle private data and information are the major targets of the information thieves. The construction and engineering sector handles critical data and information that are needed for the development of infrastructures and so they have a legal obligation to comply with the laws of privacy (Fluor.com 2018). It is important for the companies like Fluor to keep the private data and information of the customers, employees, businesses secure from the stages of creation to its disposal (Crane and Matten 2016). There are companies that do not have a perfect policy to shred the hard disk and thus the hard disks are stockpiled and in case those are kept in a locked storage, still it can get stolen. The companies within the engineering sector do have a legal obligation for destroying the hard disk with a hammer, but most of the companies are unable to do it because of the corporate and professional environment where they had been working. According to the codes of conduct and ethics, there must be a professional destruction company that would destroy all the hard disks that were disposed when content had been still present in it (Slade and Prinsloo 2013). One of the most effective way to prevent security of data and ensuring that no other person could get access to the secured and confidential data within the hard disk, recycling should be one. Recycling the hard drives or hard disks is considered as beneficial for preventing accessibility by the information thieves, furthermore ensure successful management of data security and complying to the legal obligations as a whole too. Other ethical issues included lack of safety and welfare of the workers as well as the public (Burgess et al. 2013). The engineering activities often require handling engineering components, high performing machineries and equipments, which must be handled properly, otherwise it would lead to physical injury or harm to the individuals. It was often seen that due to lack of knowledge and skills among the workers, they failed to handle the equipments and machineries properly that caused harm to them and sometimes the public was also subjected to harm. The Codes of conduct and ethics are considered for maintaining the standards and ensure that the workers should be kept safe and healthy as well (Pardo and Siemens 2014). The Codes of conduct implemented by the Government of Australia must be followed by the companies within the Engineering sector for ensuring abiding to the rules, laws and regulations and ensure successful maintenance of safety, health and wellbeing of the workers. According to the ethical standards, proper knowledge and information should be disseminated to the workers of Fluor to make them aware of the impacts created and make sure o handle the equipments carefully to reduce the chances of accidental occurrences (Doorn and Kroesen 2013).

Importance of communication and education for ICT workers

There were numerous codes of conduct that had been introduced by the Government to overcome the ethical issues and maintain a positive ethical culture for promoting teamwork, communication, equal opportunities for the employees, maintaining the safety and welfare of the employees and ensuring disposal of wastes properly for creating lesser harmful impact on the environment. According to the Labor Relations Act, employment practices between the employer and employees were maintain to manage good behaviors with them and providing them with the right amounts of wages according to their job roles and responsibilities. The Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act further contributed to the prevention of any forms of discrimination within the workplace and even making sure to provide the workers with equal scopes and opportunities, regardless of whether they had been male or female workers (Jesiek et al. 2014). The Securities Services Act was another legislation that focused on maintaining the security of data and information of the customers of Fluor Australia and disposing the hard disks consisting of important data in such a manner, so that they those could not be accessed by other people. This could prevent unauthorized access to the confidential data and information and furthermore maintain better security and authenticity of data and information stored in the databases. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act could prevent any sort of corruption and bribery where money should be taken for personal benefits and for gaining better employment scopes and opportunities than the others (Carroll and Buchholtz 2014).

The Environmental Protection Act was introduced by the Government to ensure that the environmental laws, rules and regulations were followed and the companies within the Engineering sector could manage disposal of wastes in the proper areas and even focus on incineration techniques to burn and destroy the entire wastes. The construction and engineering materials and toxic chemicals must not be flowed down into the water bodies, which could also create negative environmental impact. Fluor Pty Ltd.’s sustainability mission would be to meet the needs and requirements of the customer and at the same time become socially and environmentally responsible for creating positive mindsets among them (Triassi et al. 2015). This would benefit the present as well as the future generations and furthermore allow the company to safeguard the environment, conserve a lot of energy, protect the lives of living beings, strengthen the social structures, economies and finally maintain an ecological balance in nature with ease and effectiveness (Higgins, Short and South 2013). The company had protected the right to privacy and maintained freedom of expression to protect the data and information of clients for maintaining the security an authenticity of data and information (Fluor.com 2018).    

Conclusion

From the report, it could be understood that there were various codes of cinduct and ethical issues including the disposal of toxic wastes in the water bodies and environment that affected the ecological balance in nature and even created negative environmental impact. There were other ethical issues where the data and information considered as confidential and private, present in the hard disks were disposed without destroying the contents. This caused preventing the security of data and information and further prevented the security and confidentiality of data and information. Discrimination was another ethical issue that enabled treating the male and female workers of the companies within the Engineering sector unequally and sometimes few people were employed by taking bribes, which might be against the company laws. This created violation of the organizational standards and the performance degraded too, which furthermore created a negative mindset about the brand among the customers. To overcome this, the companies must make sure to follow the Codes of conduct, legislations and laws to ensuring safety and welfare of workers and keeping the confidential data and information secure and safe.

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