Yesterday’s Leadership Daily Advisor examined how the C-suite sets the tone for an effective, ironclad ethics rulebook. Today we offer three more themes to give your ethics strategy a checkup.
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No Holds Barred
Query the core. Incorporate key questions from the Ethics & Compliance Initiative’s business ethics survey into your broader company employee surveys. These opinions, notes the Arlington, VA-based research organization, can get to the heart of the ethical areas of most significance to compliance. Examples, which can be rated on a five-point scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree, include:
- The leader of my organization sets a good example of ethical business behavior.
- My manager sends a clear message that unethical behavior is not tolerated.
- I never feel pressured to compromise the company’s code of conduct.
- I have no fear of retaliation for reporting unethical behavior.
- If I report unethical behavior, I’m confident appropriate action will be taken.
Look for other issues. Employ some professional skepticism and always keep an eye open for other improvement opportunities. Then, share your thoughts with relevant colleagues. For example, ethics issues in a sales area may have revenue-recognition implications from a financial reporting perspective. Auditors generally agree that three conditions are present when fraud exists:
- Incentive/pressure to perpetrate fraud,
- An opportunity to carry out the fraud, and
- Attitude/rationalization to justify the fraudulent action.
React consistently and communicate. Communicating your company’s ethics policy never ends—it’s a continuous process. Discipline ethics violations in complete accord with policies and procedures and the code of conduct every time. Also, use ethics issues, when possible, as a basis for “lessons learned” in ethics-related communications and training.
In the end, the real litmus test of whether your efforts at ethics are working and remain deeply embedded is if every employee feels comfortable enough to speak up whenever there’s a concern and is confident that leadership will respond and take action.