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.