Institutionalization

Merely implementing an Ethics Management Program is not enough. An Ethics Management Program should be embedded into the being of a company. Therefore, when implementing the program, it should not only be communicated to employees as one will communicate a simple work procedure, it needs the implementation needs to touch each and every employees head, heart and hands:

Heads: Employees must be able to understand the Ethics management program, in other words it must be communicated well to them. Questions to be answered to employees should be ‘What is happening?’ and ‘Why is it happening?’

Hearts: The ethics management program must acknowledge your motivation and emotions. The best way to achieve this is to get all stakeholders involved in the process from the start. Let employees elect their stakeholders who will also act as communication agents through the process.

Hands: Last but not least, the ethics management program must change behaviour by inspiring ethical conduct. Ensure that everybody in the organisation understand their roles and responsibilities and have the resources to act upon them.

An ethics committee could play a vital role in this process. They should establish and maintain the necessary ethics policies and strategies, ethics training initiatives and ethics communication strategies. The ethics office should also identify ethics advocates or champions at all levels within the organisation who can stimulate and sustain dialogue to ensure that ethics is effectively built into the structure and the culture of the organisation.

Ethics Performance Measurement

A vital phase of institutionalisation process is to regularly monitor and assess the effectiveness of the ethics management framework of the organisation. Ethics performance indicators can be used to measure effectiveness and monitor the organisation’s improvement or decline in ethical health over a period of time.

The success of an Ethics Management Program lies in the intangible field of an ethical business climate and culture. It is more difficult to measure climate and culture, than to measure financial success of an organisation. It could however be achieved by measuring the successful implementation Ethics processes first and thereafter the impact it had on the organisational value system.

Codes, policy and procedure implementation review

Process implementation review (eg. Hotline, ethical dilemma management, etc.)

Value survey – compare results from year to year to view improvements

It is very important to build all the information gained from this evaluation to the Risk Assessment of the next phase, which will assist the organisation to continually improve their Ethics Management Process.

The Ethics Program as Part of the Bigger Picture

An ethics management program is always part of a bigger picture on an organisation. To go back to basics: Why would an organisation need an ethics management program? The whole drive towards ethics management was born to fight corruption in businesses. The Enron saga was the main trigger behind the ethics movement. Therefore an ethics management program will always be part of the bigger anti-corruption strategy in a company.