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An ethics audit can reveal gaps in your ethics policies and practices.
When it comes to corporate ethics, bad news is good news. According to the Ethics Resource Center's 2009 National Business Ethics Survey, on-the-job misconduct is down, whistle-blowing is up, and ethical organizational cultures are stronger. Despite these trends, there may be no better time for human resource managers to conduct or participate in ethics-related audits.
Setting the Tone
Several legal developments in recent years have placed newfound focus on how companies behave. An example is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, with its emphasis on "tone at the top" and its requirement that publicly traded companies disclose whether they have a code of ethics to deter wrongdoing. The Federal Acquisition Regulation and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines also have a significant impact on organizations' ethics policies and practices by requiring or providing incentives to encourage businesses of all kinds and sizes to adopt codes of conduct, train their employees on these codes, and create effective audit and reporting mechanisms.
HR professionals play a crucial role in shaping corporate ethical codes, policies and procedures and then communicating and teaching that information to the workforce. In many companies, the top HR manager either serves as the de facto chief ethics and compliance officer or works with the person in that role to manage ethics and compliance programs. Apart from the chief executive officer, there may be no more important ethical role model in the organization than an HR manager.
"Employees watch HR like hawks, and they should," says Phillip Daniels, SPHR, HR manager for Montgomery College in Rockville, Md. "If HR managers mess up, how can we expect employees to adhere to the ethical standards that we're promoting? As HR managers, we essentially need to serve as the poster children for ethical behavior."
HR managers who thrive as ethical role models almost always play central roles in conducting ethics-related audits, notes Marjorie Doyle, principal of ethics consulting firm Marjorie Doyle & Associates in Landenberg, Pa., and a member of the Advisory Board of Directors for the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics. As a former chief corporate ethics and compliance officer, "I spent a lot of time with HR," she says.
HR managers are "trying to get people...