Compliance, Ethics and the Multi-generational Workforce

But there is a world of difference between creating a compliance and ethics program and effectively implementing one so that employees actually engage with it and adhere to it. A scan of the business news headlines reveals no shortage of malfeasance that breaches regulatory and ethical standards. For example, violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) create headlines based on the large sums companies pay in fines and disgorgements. FCPA violations alone accounted for $4.63 billion in settlement payments between 2007 and 2013 from enforcement actions by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Securities Exchange Commission (SEC). See Koehler, Mike, A Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Narrative. Mich. State Int. Law Rev. 22.3 (2014): 961-1094. The FCPA is but one of the numerous laws and regulations that corporations are subject to and against which corporate infractions are reported on a seemingly weekly basis.

While the Ethics Resource Center, in its 2013 National Business Ethics Survey, reported that the percentage of employees who said that they have “observed misconduct on the job” dropped to the lowest in the survey's history: 41%, or two out of every five workers, this is still a significant number. And more than one of every three of these individuals did not report the observed misconduct. Perhaps the most encouraging findings to support the impact that compliance and ethics programs can have are: In companies judged to have a “strong” ethics cultures, only one in five workers said they saw misconduct, while in companies with the weakest ethics cultures, close to nine in 10 employees observed misconduct. See National Business Ethics Survey of the U.S. Workforce. Ethics Resource Center (ERC), 2014.