Contained in this category are any whitepapers or working group reports that the Ethics & Compliance Initiative helped to create.
How does a company create a sense of connection to its purpose and values with new employees who have never met any of their colleagues in person? Can misconduct investigations be effectively conducted solely through video interviews? Are there unique risks that need to be addressed when a company has a large remote workforce or supply chain? These questions drive to the core of ethics and compliance and represent some of the challenges faced when a company decides to either move to, or expand an already existing remote working environment (RWE) program.
Expectations regarding the role of the corporation in society are shifting. As a consequence, many investors and companies are reexamining and adjusting the way they do business. For decades, the nearly unquestioned wisdom, at least in the United States, has been that, as economist Milton Friedman famously declared in 1970, 'the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits' in the service of shareholders. 1 That foundational premise has started to crack. Many business leaders, investors, legal practitioners, and scholars are now calling into question the "shareholder primacy" business model. Instead, they say, a corporation must jointly serve the interests of many stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, employees, local communities, and shareholders, and should no longer focus narrowly on "maximizing shareholder value." 2. One manifestation of these sentiments is the emergence of non-financial corporate performance metrics, often referred to as "environmental, social, and governance," or just "ESG."
The Ethics & Compliance Initiative’s (ECI’s) Ethics Culture Assessment is a comprehensive employee survey that measures the impact of ethics & compliance (E&C) programs and ethics culture. ECI’s survey framework is based on over three decades of research and collaboration with leading E&C practitioners and academics. Since 1990, ECI has tested and fielded over 300 questions through its Global Business Ethics Survey® (GBES®) and client surveys. ECI has isolated a series of key topic areas and questions that have proven to be reliable and valid indicators of E&C program strength and ethics culture. Findings from ECI’s Ethics Culture Assessment can be used in conjunction with ECI’s HQP Assessment to provide organizations with an analysis of the impact and quality of their E&C programs and ethics cultures. This document provides a high-level overview of the topic areas included in ECI’s Ethics Culture Assessment. The length of the assessment is customized based on the needs of each organization.
