Ethics and compliance (E&C) has become an identifiable function in many organizations today. In some cases, E&C programs are born out of necessity in the aftermath of wrongdoing. In many other instances, programs arise from an organizations voluntary investment in the strategic goal of conducting business with integrity. Regardless of why they were created, E&C programs by their very nature play an important role in the viability and ongoing success of any institution. The size, scope and structure of an E&C program vary with the makeup of an organization. A program in a large, publicly traded multinational looks altogether different from an effort in a small, privately held business. Even more different are E&C programs in nonprofit and government entities. Nonetheless, the fundamental purpose of the function is almost universal. An organizational ethics and compliance program exists to: • Ensure and sustain integrity in the organizations performance and its reputation as a responsible business. • Reduce the risk of wrongdoing by parties employed by or aligned with the organization. • Increase the likelihood that, when it occurs, wrongdoing will be made known to management within the organization. • Increase the likelihood that the organization will responsibly handle suspected and substantiated wrongdoing.
Reliance on supplier organizations can raise the risks related to corruption and employee misconduct. ECI?s 2016 Global Business Ethics Survey? (GBES?): Measuring Risk and Promoting Workplace Integrity
This report presents the best thinking on managing conflicts from a group of experienced E&C professionals from a variety of industries and organizations. It also includes results from a targeted survey of the full ECI membership (?the Survey?). Our focus is on identifying best practices and accompanying risks, as a guide to practitioners. In addition to the body of the report, we have put together an appendix with sample policy provisions and documents from leading organizations. The report is organized into four sections: 1. Defining Conflicts, 2. Preventing Conflicts, 3. Identifying Conflicts, and 4. Dealing with Conflicts. Each section touches on aspects of the others, so the report should be read as a whole.
The National Business Ethics Survey® (NBES®) generates the U.S. benchmark on ethical behavior in corporations. Findings represent the views of the American workforce in the private sector. Since 1994, the NBES and its supplemental reports have provided business leaders a snapshot of trends in workplace ethics and an identification of the drivers that improve ethical workforce behavior. With every report, ERC researchers identify strategies that business leaders can adopt to strengthen ethics cultures.
When the largest companies (those with 90,000 or more employees) invest resources in ethics and compliance, they get impressive results. The strength of a company’s ethics culture and the effectiveness of its internal ethics and compliance (E&C) program are closely tied to workplace behavior. Each key indicator of ethical performance - pressure to compromise ethics standards, observation of misconduct, reporting of violations, and retaliation for reporting - improves in large companies with strong ethics cultures. Ethical performance is strengthened in companies with effective E&C programs. In fact, pressure and retaliation become extremely rare in the largest companies when they implement effective ethics programs.
In every human endeavor, including ethics, leadership can make the difference between success and failure. As part of its National Business Ethics Survey, ERC set out to learn what?s required for successful ethical leadership and what leaders can do to set an ethical tone at the top and inspire employees to do the right thing. With data from the survey, we explored the relationship between management behaviors and employee conduct. Among the most notable findings: the most significant factor in ethical leadership is employees? perception of their leaders? personal character. Leaders who demonstrate they are ethical people with strong character have a much greater impact on worker behavior than deliberate and visible efforts to promote ethics.