Findings from the 2017 Ethics and Compliance Survey
Convercent and Ethisphere recently released findings from a survey about the importance of an ethical business culture. A culture of ethics is finally being recognized by the top brass as a key differentiator and critical to long-term success. The report touches on today’s biggest ethics and compliance challenges and demonstrates that CECOs are beginning to take a seat at the table. Read on for additional findings.
Keeping pace with technology is never an easy feat, but it seems Chief Compliance and Ethics Officers have found themselves awash in a sea of data — especially data useful to sustaining the long-term ethical culture of the organization. According to the 2017 Ethics and Compliance Survey, which surveyed more than 335 business ethics leaders across the United States and abroad, in spite of their best efforts to mitigate potential issues, Chief Compliance and Ethics Officers often find themselves in the spotlight for ethical blunders committed by their companies. Among their key challenges: it seems they continue to struggle with effectively aggregating and analyzing data due in part to outdated technology and a lack of available tools.
“We have come so far over the course of the last decade, in terms of the data — the actual data that is available to companies,” said Ethisphere’s Erica Salmon Byrne, EVP and Executive Director, Business Ethics Leadership Alliance (BELA). “We’re starting to see data about employee turnover, employee culture and productivity, but we’re not 100 percent there yet, because as the report points out, Most CECOs are forced to gather siloed data from multiple departments, and that’s an issue we’ve got to solve as a community.”
The 2017 Ethics and Compliance Survey, which was released last week by Ethisphere and compliance services firm Convercent also found that companies are no longer tracking open-door reports, and “organizations are missing out on critical insights into the health of the organization.” Nearly 73 percent of employees in Ethisphere’s overall culture data set say they directly raise concerns with their managers but lack the data gathered from open-door reports.
“Core values and a focus on ethical behavior has never been more critical for long-term business success. More and more companies are waking up to the fact that an ethics-based culture is no longer a ‘nice to have’ – it’s necessary for survival amidst a global ethical transformation,” said Patrick Quinlan, CEO and Co-Founder of Convercent. “The survey illuminates the toughest challenges, biggest opportunities and evolving technologies for companies working to establish programs oriented around proactivity and doing the right thing.”
To download the report, click here or reach out to Aarti Maharaj, Ethisphere.
