ETHICS MONITOR RESULTS

The Ethics Monitor results provide valuable insight into an organisation’s ethical status. The results offer a useful and accurate guide as to what action can or should be taken, whether remedial to address a problem, cautionary to address a potential problem or proactive to build on a perceived strength.

In order to realise the benefits of these insights, it is imperative that the organisation acts on the survey results.

The survey results:

• Produce a measure of the company’s overall ethical status, which can be used by the social and ethics committee to report to the company’s board and at the AGM, and which can be shared with shareholders, stakeholders and the market;
• Produce a measure of the ethical status of each branch, department, work level and stakeholder group;
• Reveal which areas in the organisation are ethically strongest, so that these strengths can be grown and expanded further in the organisation;
• Reveal what areas in the organisation are ethically weakest and need to be investigated further or that warrant action;
• Highlight the degree of the organisation’s ethical strengths and weaknesses, to enable the company to identify and prioritize the actions to be taken.

Key dimensions of workplace ethics

The Ethics Monitor results provide insight into 3 key dimensions of workplace ethics :

• Ethical behaviour which identifies the factors that promote or encourage ethical behaviour;
• Unethical behaviour which identifies the factors that prevent or reduce such behaviour;
• Ethical boundary which identifies the extent to which the organisation’s values apply to different stakeholder groups and the extent to which the organisation follows a triple bottom line approach.

Ethics Monitor questions

The survey questions explore stakeholder’s perceptions and experiences relative to these 3 ethical concepts (discussed above) to provide more detailed results, such as:

• Which values employees are least and most committed to;
• The extent to which leaders live the organisation’s values;
• The primary factors that drive ethical behaviour;
• The primary factors that reduce unethical behaviour;
• The extent to which certain unethical practices occur in the organisation;
• The extent to which the organisation’s values are exercised relative to internal and external stakeholders;
• The extent to which employees are valued above profits or personal gain;
• The extent to which the organisation supports social and environmental initiatives.