Corporate Values and Ethics

¶ … Market Forces on Corporate Values In corporate settings, corporate values are today being affected by market forces relating to diversity and changes in demographics in America. Employers have begun to recognize the need to address the new face of the workplace and the new diversity caused by the shift in demographics. They have made strides to diversify the workplace and make the new demographics of their business place work just as well, if not better, than before.

Part of the reason they have done so is because if they do not do so, it would affect their bottom line. One of example of the new complexity of the workforce is that today's workers are much more diverse in age than in years past. Workers in a company not only span the range from late teens to post-retirement age, but in many cases, executives at the same level in the company may span wide ranges of ages.

In fact, young executives - for example, newly minted M.B.A.'s -- are often above older executives in the corporate hierarchy. This new widespread diversity of age in the workplace will have effects on the corporate workings. First, companies will need to seriously consider whether, for example, they are looking to employ older employees on a retirement path, on a temporary basis, to serve as mentors for younger up and coming employees, or for some other reason.

Also, wide diversity in ages of employees can mean problems in assessing significant differences in salaries and benefits, particularly where older workers may have significant years with the company but are at a lower level than a new employee at a higher level on the corporate ladder.

Second, in today's world, workers' family and home situations are much more complex and diverse than they used to be, and businesses must take this into account when making basic decisions such as work hours, work-sharing decisions, benefit packages, retirement ages, and much more. In particular, the new trends in family situations have required employers to pay more attention to benefit and compensation packages that speak to the needs of these different types of home situations.

For example, a gay couple will be particularly interested in whether a company's health plan covers their significant other. If employers in the new economy ignore such needs, they will not be able to attract or retain quality employees from all segments of the population. Another example: couples with shared child rearing responsibilities may ask their respective employers to let them work not part time per se, but work in a work-share situation.

In other words, each person may which to split the duties of their job with someone else at their workplace, and be paid accordingly. In this way, for jobs that require a high level of responsibility and thus require a person to be at work virtually at all times, a work-share situation will allow for part-time situations for parents where it would not have been possible before.

Different generations of Americans have decidedly different family patterns, and today's corporate employer must accommodate these differences if they wish to compete successfully in the global economy. For example, it used to be the norm - at least for the middle class in America -- that a household consisted of a working father, a stay-at-home mother, and two to three children. Today, quite to the contrary, many professional couples today have decided to hold off on having children until they are older or not to have children at all.

This trend has made a significant impact on the ratio of professional couples with children to those without. That is, there are many more couples in the workplace without children today than in the past. In turn, this trend has meant a widespread increase in women in the workplace. In sum, many married people are working today who do not have children (or whose children or older than 18, due to the fact that Americans now have a longer life expectancy). Just.