Summary: Ethics and Compliance Training: What Gets Results

Employee training is a subject that has been examined at length. This ECI research report offers an exclusive ethics and compliance perspective on training. The report acknowledges a certain amount of overlap with studies that more broadly examine training methods. However, because of the specificity and design of ECI?s research, the report provides important insights related to ethics and compliance (E&C) training. Two complementary surveys were conducted. The first survey explored the experiences of employees who had taken company E&C training. The second gathered information about training from the perspective of E&C practitioners. The results of these two surveys contrast the intended goals of E&C training and the employee beliefs about the usefulness of the training they received. The results outline which activities are associated with the best results. Important E&C training components emerged. Employees see the need for and have positive views of ethics and compliance training, but stress the need for the training to be applicable and informative. The survey indicates, and the results advocate, the use of in-person or monitored training when organizations are influencing their culture or critical policies. The survey also identified the critical importance of senior leadership?s visible participation during the training process. Whether in person, or by video, the impact and desired results of training are significantly better when senior leaders are a visible part of the training. This aligns with previous research by ECI indicating that employees? perceptions of the tone at the top come from their perceptions of their personal interactions with leadership. Even if by communicated video, employees indicate that they are positively impacted by senior leadership?s endorsement of training.

2024-03-21T00:59:54-04:00Saturday, April 22, 2017|

Ethics and Compliance Training: What Gets Results

Employee training is a subject that has been examined at length. This ECI research report offers an exclusive ethics and compliance perspective on training. The report acknowledges a certain amount of overlap with studies that more broadly examine training methods. However, because of the specificity and design of ECI?s research, the report provides important insights related to ethics and compliance (E&C) training. Two complementary surveys were conducted. The first survey explored the experiences of employees who had taken company E&C training. The second gathered information about training from the perspective of E&C practitioners. The results of these two surveys contrast the intended goals of E&C training and the employee beliefs about the usefulness of the training they received. The results outline which activities are associated with the best results. Important E&C training components emerged. Employees see the need for and have positive views of ethics and compliance training, but stress the need for the training to be applicable and informative. The survey indicates, and the results advocate, the use of in-person or monitored training when organizations are influencing their culture or critical policies. The survey also identified the critical importance of senior leadership?s visible participation during the training process. Whether in person, or by video, the impact and desired results of training are significantly better when senior leaders are a visible part of the training. This aligns with previous research by ECI indicating that employees? perceptions of the tone at the top come from their perceptions of their personal interactions with leadership. Even if by communicated video, employees indicate that they are positively impacted by senior leadership?s endorsement of training.

2024-03-22T14:07:21-04:00Saturday, April 22, 2017|

Blue Ribbon Panel: Principles and Practices of High-Quality Ethics & Compliance Programs

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.

2025-04-21T18:06:18-04:00Friday, April 22, 2016|

Ethics & Compliance Risk In The Supply Chain

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

2024-03-21T01:04:41-04:00Friday, April 22, 2016|

Conflicts of Interest

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.

2024-03-21T01:05:45-04:00Friday, April 22, 2016|

Increasing Employee Reporting Free From Retaliation

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.

2024-03-22T14:09:00-04:00Wednesday, April 22, 2015|

The State of Ethics in Large Companies

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.

2024-03-22T14:09:14-04:00Wednesday, April 22, 2015|