Contained in this category are any reports or documents that were created by the Ethics & Compliance Initiative
Find out why employees are more likely to report again if they strongly agree accountability is present.
This year’s GBES highlighted some significant takeaways about the state of ethics & compliance in the workplace across several dimensions: • For the first time, the survey explores whether where employees perform the majority of their work—remote, on-site, or “on the road”1—can impact the employee’s experience and the organization’s ethical
Accountability is accepting or ensuring responsibility for decisions or actions, especially when those actions fail to live up to standards or core values. Accountability is tied with behaviors and attitudes that leaders work hard to instill in their organizations. Using data from the most recent iteration of the Global Business Ethics Survey® (GBES®), ECI explored: employees’ perceptions and experiences; practices, particularly those of managers, that reinforce the belief that accountability is present; and the link between accountability and other facets of an organization’s ethics culture.
Misconduct is less likely to be seen in organizations that welcome diversity.
In 2011, 45 percent of U.S. employees said they had observed misconduct in the previous 12 months. Roughly two-thirds of those who observed wrongdoing reported it. While this is the highest reporting rate we have seen, that still leaves over 20 million members of the U.S. workforce who said nothing. How confident are you that none of those 20 million work at your company? What can—what should—you do to ensure that you will know about problems before hearing about them in the paper or online? How can you improve reporting rates at your company and drive down your reputational risk? What goes through employees’ minds when deciding whether and where to report? What happens inside the mind of a whistleblower?
Perhaps now more than ever, business leaders are called on to address and manage a multitude of risks and opportunities on a global scale. With rapidly evolving technologies, urgent global issues, and stakeholders who expect more and have platforms for voicing their opinions like never before, being in business is increasingly complex. Complicating matters further, debate continues about the extent to which companies should act, particularly with regard to environmental and social challenges that arise in and beyond their operations. While a myriad of important laws and regulations have emerged to encourage companies to define and address specific issues, these are not sufficient. Critical business decisions — particularly when it comes to strategy, risk, and stakeholder impact — fall into grey areas where rules, frameworks, and laws will never be clear enough. Instead, these are ethics questions which require responsible businesses to respond by looking beyond what they must do and identifying what they should do.
