2. How should I dress?

Most of you will be in regular contact with customers. It is important that they should feel confident about the service they will receive from Westpak. We suggest that you dress in a way which is smart and business-like as a mark of respect to our clients.

3. How are interpersonal problems dealt with?

Teamwork has always been the key to success at Westpak and anything which is likely to damage co-operation between team members has to be dealt with as quickly as possible. If you feel that efficient...

Some ruler for writing guidelines:

1. Guidelines vary enormously from company to company and industry to industry. It is important to distinguish between guidelines and regulations.

2. Regulations are required for ensuring the legally correct handling of a contract, or the safe operation of a piece of machinery, for example. The language used in regulations is therefore much more directive.

3. Guidelines are also important for ensuring the smooth operation of the company, but they often touch on areas of human behaviour where it is not easy to dictate to people. The language must therefore be more persuasive and less directive, or else personnel will object.

Unit 6 Risk Business brief

All business is built on risk. Operating in politically unstable countries is one of the most extreme examples of this. The dangers may range from kidnapping of managers through to confiscation of assets by the government. Company managers may have to face fraud and corruption. But the fact that companies want to work there at all shows that they think the returns could be very high. As always, there is a trade-off between risk and return: investing in very challenging conditions is a graphic, if extreme, illustration of this trade-off.

Companies do not have to go to unstable countries to be harmed by criminal activity. Industrial espionage has existed for as long as there have been industries to spy on, but this can now be carried out at a distance by gaining access to company computer networks. IT security specialists may try to protect their company's systems with firewalls (technical safeguards against such snooping by hackers) and against computer viruses.

So far, we have looked at some of the more extreme examples of risk, but even business-as-usual is inherently risky. For example, by putting money into a new venture, investors are taking serious financial risks. Most businesses fail (some put the figure as high as nine out often), and as the first shakeout of Internet start-ups showed, this can happen increasingly quickly after they are founded. Venture capitalists who put money into such businesses spread their risk so that the payback from one or two successful ventures will hopefully more than compensate for the money lost in the failures. For more on financial risk, see Unit 9 Raising finance.

There is also the risk that even apparently well-established companies that are seemingly in touch with their customers can easily start to go wrong: we can all think of examples in soft drinks, clothing, cars and retailing, to name a few. Here, the risk is of losing sight of the magic ingredients that make for success. Some companies are able to reinvent themselves, in some cases several times over. Others don't understand what they need to do to survive and thrive again, or if they do understand, are unable to transform themselves in the necessary ways. The things about the company that were formerly strengths can now become sources of weakness and obstacles to change. The financial markets see this, and the company's shares fall in value. Investors are increasingly quick to demand changes in top management if there are not immediate improvements. In some cases, companies that were the leaders in their industry can even go bankrupt: in airlines, think of PanAm.

And then there is the risk of management complacency. Take a tyre company. A few weeks of shoddy operations and enough faulty tyres are produced to put the whole future of the company at risk through product liability claims following accidents caused by blow-outs. Product recalls are the worst possible §publicity imaginable for companies, and in the worst cases, their image is so damaged that they never recover. This is a case study in reputational risk: the trust that customers put in a company can be thrown away overnight. Another example of a company that destroyed the trust of its clients Is the well-known Internet service provider that announced free access at all times, and then immediately withdrew the offer. One commentator described this as brand suicide.

Example of a report:

Parry, Parry & Gibson

Site accident report

Executive summary

Damage has been caused to the emergency generator on the Witherby power plant site. It was caused by a fire started by the electrical contractors Mullet & Sons. Although the packing material that caught fire was left by another subcontractor, the personnel from Mullet started work before clearing the waste matter away, in contravention of contract regulation 2.3.8. Mullet & Sons should therefore pay for the replacement of the damaged equipment.