Published: June 16, 2008
Good Fellows
The Ethics Resource Center is famous for its deep-dive ethics surveys and benchmarking expertise. Just as integral is its ERC Fellows program, 60-plus ethics and compliance professionals and academics who pool their talents to extend the reach and quality of ethics programs in the workplace.
From universities, nonprofits and corporations spread across the country, the ERC Fellows gather twice a year in person to exchange ideas, identify emerging issues and meet in issue-specific working groups. But the intellectual ferment goes on year-round.
The organizing principle is to perform leading-edge research and produce practical tools. The by-product is the opportunity to network and cross-pollinate.
“I really have enjoyed it from the perspective of the chance to share information between the Fellows,” says Charles Ruthford, head of ethics program development at the Boeing Company in Seattle. “We select interesting topics and have a chance to go in depth into those topics and then talk to people from varying industries.”
Boeing, which has a 160,000-employee work force, also belongs to the Defense Industry Initiative, an ethics-related drive to improve industry standards. “We get a lot of benefit from that,” Ruthford says, “but we’re all defense contractors. With the ERC Fellows, it’s diverse companies and academics. That’s a powerful thing.”
Founded 10 years ago with support from a small group of corporate underwriters, all of the founders participate today – a testament to the ongoing value of the program. Archers Daniels Midland, General Motors, Guardsmark LLC, Lockheed Martin, Merck & Co., Inc. and United Technologies Corporation still count executives among the Fellows. (Guardsmark and Merck have been continuous supporters.) Other backers are a who’s who of American corporations, nonprofits, government agencies and academic institutions.
“It’s a very tight group,” says Jacqueline Brevard, chief ethics officer at Merck and the new chair of the Fellows. “When we get together it’s like a reunion. Weyerhauser, ADM, Boeing – all longtime members. We definitely have a fraternity. That’s absolutely part of the value.”
Brevard adds that broad national workplace surveys done by ERC help ethics and compliance officers on the front lines understand what the trends look like and what the implications are for individual ethics programs.
An example, she says, is the ERC survey data that show the importance of “tone at the top” – that top executives need to set a good example.
“In the past couple of years, some important ERC data show that the ‘tone at the top’ is also the ‘tone in the middle.’ Employees are most impacted by what the person at the top is saying. If that message isn’t getting through, it’s really hopeless.
“What do we do about going after this tone in the middle?” she adds. “Do we need to provide employee incentives? Improve the relationship between manager and employee? Eliminate fear of retaliation? That’s something we’re focusing on at Merck. Some other research has uncovered that a leading indicator is the fear of retaliation. Those are issues that many people will come around to eventually. We as Fellows get there first.”
Gary Hill, chief ethics and compliance officer at Wal-Mart’s corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, agrees.
“It [the Fellows program] is a great tool,” he says. “There’s no other organization attempting to do what it does. It gives us an opportunity as professionals to collaborate on how to solve tough issues. For example, how to properly administer help lines or retaliation claims, how to properly benchmark, how to assess your programs. The inclusion of Fellows from government and academia is very beneficial. It gives us good leverage.”
The Fellows’ working groups currently focus on five high-interest areas:
- CSR and ethics. The relationship between corporate social responsibility and ethics, both conceptually and functionally inside large organizations.
- Measuring helpline data. Organizations with mechanisms for reporting misconduct (such as hotlines) need industry-wide standards for comparison.
- Procedural justice. Helping ethics and compliance officers deal effectively with unethical conduct reported by employees.
- Incentives. How incentive programs can encourage ethical behavior in the workplace.
- Measurement. How to measure the effectiveness of training, programs and best practices.
Working group members usually produce a white paper or guidelines that summarize their research and share insights with peers.
What about the future?
“We had an exercise last year and it illustrated what we were about as a group,” says Brevard, the new chair. “I want to make sure we remain true to our mission – to make sure we remain on the leading edge. We need to become more publicly known, so that when ERC Fellows speak, people listen. But I’m not looking to make changes. I’m really seeking to elevate the level of awareness and stay true to the mission.”
More images from ERC's Fellows Program
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Mirijam Bakker |
Bill Lenox |