Does Your Organization Pass Muster on Ethical Standards?

Lots of talk these days about ethics in the workplace, so it’s not surprising that there are are a number of websites and surveys devoted to ethics in the workplace.

I found one interesting website on ethics, the Ethics Resource Center, that has lots of good materials available.

Most interesting to me were the results of a recent ethics survey. The survey found the following, rather scary, reports regarding ethics in the workplace:

• 52% of employees observed at least one type of misconduct in the workplace in the past year, with 36% of these observing at least 2 or more violations.
• 69% of employees report their organizations implement ethics training, up 14 percentage points from the 2003 survey.
• 65% of employees indicated their organizations have a place they can seek ethics advice.
• 55% of employees who observed misconduct at work reported it to management, down 10 percentage points from the 2003 survey.

Go here to read more on ethics in the workplace and programs to address them.

It is somewhat troubling to me that fewer employees seem willing to report misconduct at work, despite the increased number of organizations providing ethics training!

Experts suggest that an effective ethics and compliance program has these elements:

1. Written standards of conduct
2. Training on ethics
3. Mechanisms to seek ethics advice or information
4. Means to report misconduct anonymously
5. Discipline of employees who violate ethical standards
6. Evaluation of employees performance based on ethical conduct

How does your organization measure up on these elements?