2021 ECI Working Group Today’s business environment continues to be fast-paced and driven by the exponentially increasing speed of information. That, along with evolving technology, remote work and other factors, has created a constant state of change for almost all of us. Often, change is more sweeping and includes organizational
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) publishes guidelines for organizations operating in the U.S. upon which corporate compliance programs are measured and against which organizations should be investigated for wrongdoing. The findings discussed in this summary are based on ECI’s Corporate Compliance Program and DOJ Enforcement Policies Survey (“survey”) which was designed to obtain ethics & compliance leaders’ opinions about the DOJ’s enforcement guidelines and their intersection with corporate compliance programs. ECI surveyed chief ethics & compliance officers, chief compliance officers and chief ethics officers or their equivalents (ethics & compliance leaders). A key objective was to gather information that would help provide guidance to organizations and DOJ on actions that would improve compliance and enforcement efforts. Each section of this summary report discusses key findings on the guidance documents and other pertinent content from the survey. When reading this report, please keep in mind that the survey was conducted prior to the October 28, 2021 DOJ memorandum making revisions to the department’s existing corporate criminal enforcement policies and practices. DOJ will consider an organization’s entire criminal history, require that organizations provide information on “all persons involved in corporate misconduct,” and commit to imposing monitors where appropriate.
Since 1994, the Ethics & Compliance Initiative (ECI) has conducted a longitudinal, cross-sectional study of workplace conduct from the employee’s perspective. Now in its sixteenth iteration, ECI’s Global Business Ethics Survey® (GBES®) data provide the global benchmark on the state of ethics & compliance (E&C) in business. Since its inception, ECI’s research has provided leaders with reliable data on trends in workplace ethics focusing on the key drivers that improve ethical cultures in the workplace and how changes in culture impact ethics outcomes. The strength of an organization’s ethics culture is measured through multiple indicators of employee behaviors at various levels within an organization, including leaders, supervisors and coworkers. These behaviors demonstrate and promote a commitment to ethics on a daily basis. A thriving ethics culture involves commitment, modeling and the right conduct by all employees in an organization. Our research shows that the quality of an organization’s E&C program and the strength of the organization’s ethics culture is key to achieving desired ethics outcomes. In addition, while a multitude of factors influence ethical behavior, the interplay of four major ethics outcomes are tied to the daily micro decisions employees make with respect to how they behave in the workplace. These are: pressure in the workplace to compromise ethical standards; observations of misconduct; reporting misconduct; and ultimately, the retaliation perceived by employees after they reported misconduct.
A special invitation from our ECA Board Chair Steve Scarpino, Former Director, Ethics & Compliance for BP It is not enough for a company to implement an ethics & compliance program. To make sure it is effective; you must measure it and - importantly -