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Employee Survey Assessments

Learn what your employees know before it becomes the next corporate headline!

The Ethics Resource Center (ERC) is a private, non-profit organization devoted to independent research and the advancement of high ethical standards and practices in public and private institutions. For the past 10 years, ERC has assisted organizations with their efforts to assess their ethics and compliance programs.

ERC's Approach to Assessments

ERC takes a stakeholder, outcomes-based approach to ethics and compliance assessment. This method focuses on how program inputs and the organizational culture impact program outcomes. Our survey instruments assess interrelated components of an effective ethics and compliance program, specifically: formal program elements, risk, ethical culture and expected program outcomes.

Our survey instruments assess some or all of the following components of an ethics and compliance program.

  • Formal Program Elements – As identified by the U.S. Sentencing Commission in the  Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations;
  • Risk – Exposure to situations that invite violation of an organization's standards or the law;
  • Ethical Culture – Indicators of the extent to which members of the organization embody and conduct business according to the standards of the organization, and the nature of pressures to commit misconduct; and,   
  • Program Outcomes – Measures of the extent to which a program is achieving its intended objectives and is promoting ethical conduct overall.

Compliance With FSGO

ERC surveys provide organization with an affordable mechanism for compliance with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations (FSGO), which call for "periodic measurement of program effectiveness" (Section 8B2.1(a)(1)).

Under the FSGO, organizations meeting its criteria will be eligible for penalty reductions upon sentencing for violation of federal criminal law. Organizations may even be able to avoid prosecution, under recent Department of Justice guidance, if they can argue that individual criminal conduct attributable to the organization occurred despite its having an effective ethics and compliance program following the FSGO model (The Thompson Memorandum). For more information on FSGO, visit the United States Sentencing Commission website, www.ussc.gov.

Survey Offerings

ERC offers a suite of ethics and compliance assessments tailored to fit specific organizational needs.

Our surveys include:

  • Ethical Culture Assessment: This survey provides a means for organizations to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their culture and track how ethical conduct and compliance elements of organizational culture contribute to achieving an effective ethics and compliance program.
  • Formal Program Elements Assessment: This survey allows an organization to focus specifically on employee awareness of formal program elements, as defined by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and the impact those elements have on the overall program success.  
  • Comprehensive Survey of Program Effectiveness: This survey assesses the key measures of an effective ethics and compliance program and their relationships to expected program outcomes.  
  • Pulse Surveys: ERC also offers short surveys designed to provide organizations with a cost-effective means to gauge employee perceptions on a particular subject. These surveys complement comprehensive surveys offered annually or biennially.

Survey Hosting

ERC hosts its surveys in house, which allows maximum flexibility to customize question sets and cost effectively survey an unlimited sample of your organization's population.

Data Analysis

Leveraging our research in the National Business Ethics Survey® and experience with organizational ethics, ERC's analysis focuses on the dynamics between the survey measures.

We provide organizations with information to:

  • Gauge employee awareness about formal program elements, as defined by FSGO, and what impact these elements are having on overall program goals.
  • Determine how ethical culture, especially the behaviors by employees at different levels of management, affect how likely people are to observe misconduct, report misconduct, feel pressure to commit misconduct, etc.
  • Examine relationships between pressure to commit misconduct, observed misconduct and reporting levels.
  • Investigate differences in perceptions among demographic lines, e.g., management levels, regions and divisions.

Benchmarking

The value of ERC's benchmarks is based on a combination of solid measures of program effectiveness, a rigorous methodology applied to data collection, and the richness and size of our database.

ERC provides benchmarks to:

  • U.S. Averages: U.S. Averages are based on data from ERC's 2005 National Business Ethics Survey®. NBES is a survey of more than 3,000 American workers on their perceptions about ethics in their workplaces. ERC's also provides benchmarks to subsets of the NBES population, notably the group of NBES respondents who work in organizations with formal ethics and compliance programs or in organizations with strong cultures.  For more information on NBES, visit, www.ethics.org/research/nbes-2005.asp.
  • Industry/Association Peers: Clients can access consortium benchmarks if they are a part of industries or associations for which ERC has collected a critical mass of data. These benchmarks provide clients with comparable data from organizations engaged in similar ethics and compliance activities or that face similar business challenges.
  • Internal benchmarks: Internal company benchmarks, based on past survey data, allow leaders to set organizational goals — and subsequently, measure improvement—relative to the organization's own performance.
  • Demographic groups within benchmarks: Using the ERC Online benchmarking portal, organizations can benchmark segments of their population like subgroups within the U.S. workforce and consortium benchmarks.  For instance, you can compare employees at different management levels in your organization to their counterparts nationally.

ERC Online Benchmarking Portal

ERC provides clients with access to an online tool for organizations to better understand their own data on ethics and compliance program effectiveness. Specially, ERC Online allows organizations to:

  • Benchmark survey data against industry peers and national averages
  • Analyze data by demographics such as division, business unit, management level, country, age, tenure and union/non-union, and benchmark these cross-tabs against industry peers and national averages
  • Generate tables, bar graphs and PowerPoint slides for presentations
  • View updated benchmarks for industry and national averages as ERC accumulates more data
  • Share lessons learned and discuss emerging issues with industry peers and within your own company on discussion boards
  • Review ERC research papers to provide context for organizational survey findings
  • Access resources from organizations dedicated to ethics, compliance and anti-corruption from countries around the world

Click here to demo the portal.

ERC Partners Program

The ERC Partners Program is an ERC initiative to affiliate with several leading service providers in the ethics and compliance industry.

Through this initiative, professional service providers can offer their clients access to ERC's advanced measurement instruments and benchmarks. The resulting data allows Partners to better identify and address client needs. The data also enhances ERC's research on trends and best practices in organizational ethics.

The benefits of working through an ERC Partner to conduct a survey, include:

  • Access to multiple services through one provider
  • Inclusion of the ERC Partner's customized questions in your organization's survey
  • Support from an ERC Partner in interpreting your organization's survey results
  • Access to benchmarks to interpret company findings
  • Access to resources (whitepapers, strategies, tools, etc.) through ERC's Online Benchmarking Portal
  • Access to a community in which to share information on factors that positively impact organizational ethics

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