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Business Practices: Supporting the Practising Professional

Technological and social changes require changes in business and in management. It is generally agreed that the rate of external change is increasing. The changes impact on surveying businesses as much as they do on other businesses. A key change for survey businesses in recent years is that members of the public have an increasingly high expectation of professional service providers. As the Institute of Management’s Code of Conduct (quoted in Davies, 1997) puts it: ‘A professional is someone who justifiably claims to provide an expert service of value to society, and who accepts the duties… including… honouring the special trust reposed by clients, employers, colleagues, and the general public’. Survey companies’ stakeholders are increasingly demanding, putting a greater emphasis on the professional’s ability and duty to consider the needs of wider society as well as of the client, and to be able to deal with this balance successfully. Allred (1999), however, suggests that professionals struggle to rationalise the (often conflicting) standards of their own, their company, their profession, and the public. As if this wasn’t sufficient, further changes in the business environment in recent years include (for a fuller exposition, see Greenway, 2001): − The growth of the power (and respectability) of pressure groups, adding complexity to the balance that has to be struck by professionals; − The intertwining of different professions, in large part due to technological developments, meaning that a professional is expected to have a base knowledge of a number of professions; − The immediacy and reach of communication tools, allowing and requiring rapid decisions; − An increasing globalisation, requiring managers to understand regional differences in culture, people and law; − An increasing intolerance by many governments of self-regulation by professionals; and − Profound technological changes, meaning that practising professionals can no longer understand all that is happening inside the ‘black boxes’ that they and their assistants use in their work. Each of these changes puts additional pressure on a professional surveyor in the dual roles of expert and businessman. Neither of these roles can be ignored, and the abilities of an individual in each of them will continually be challenged. A professional surveyor will, in most cases, have a personal interest in the content of his work, and a passion to do it to the