BUS200: Business Ethics

What if your business wanted to expand its local operations from six employees to ten but did not have the office space to add more workers? Today's businesses have a toolkit of technical solutions to set up working relationships with employees far and wide through voice, computer, video connections, and offsite work-sharing spaces. Coworkers can share files on a remote network server or the cloud, and managers can use nontraditional methods to monitor activity and performance. Companies like General Assembly, WeWork, and Workbar are leasing access to communal spaces equipped for the business needs of remote workers. Telecommuting is now easier to implement than ever. But what exactly are the benefits and drawbacks of telecommuting, and what ethical issues does it raise?

The physical workplace is changing. Most companies still inhabit traditional office spaces in which managers and employees each have an allotted space, whether an office, a cubicle, or just a desk. However, a growing number are redesigning their spaces with fewer separate offices, substituting flexible or shareable workstations built around communal spaces. The idea is that such "open plan" environments allow for more collaboration and brainstorming because employees are no longer walled off from one another. Shared, multipurpose spaces open to all enable people to gather informally throughout the day. In effect, then, these changes are aimed to augment productivity.

New ideas about the way we work and for how long are challenging many traditional business strategies. Job sharing and flexible hours (or flextime), the access or sharing economy, and the rise of gig workers force us to evaluate how they affect management, employees, and customers alike. Although new business models provide increased autonomy and flexibility, they have also led to the rise of "the new precariat". The precariat, for "precarious proletariat," is a new social class of people whose work offers little predictability or security. The existence of such a class raises ethical dilemmas for business managers, who may be tempted to substitute gig workers, to whom benefits like health insurance are ordinarily not provided, for regular employees entitled to costly benefits.

As we have seen earlier in this chapter, general advances in computer technology have already enabled significant changes in the workplace. This section will look at how future workforce demographics may be affected by existing and emerging technologies. The combination of automation and robotics has already changed not only the workplace but everyday life as well. It also comes with a host of ethical and legal issues, not least being where humans will fit in the workplace of tomorrow. Managers of the future may ask, "Does my company or society benefit from having a human do a job rather than a robot, or is it all about efficiency and cost?"