Ethical Culture Assessment
The Assessment of Organizational Beliefs and Values
The Assessment of Organizational Beliefs and Values, a survey tool designed and conducted by the Center for Corporate Ethics, seeks to discover the ethical climate and key values of the client organization. The survey is divided into four major sections:
- Values asks respondents to choose the values most important to them in daily life. Respondents relate the use of those values by others in their organization. The aggregated data for this section is used to determine the most prevalent ethical values in the organization's workforce and how well people's values at different levels are perceived to be aligned.
- Ethical Environment looks for employees' perceptions of pressure for unethical conduct as well as their assessments of actual ethical relationships among the organization and its stakeholders.
- Professional Ethics asks respondents to indicate their levels of awareness about the ethics of others in the organization and to state whether the organization is "walking its talk." Moreover, employees will indicate what values would be most effective in guiding the ethics of the organization and how those values would be best applied.
- Finally, the Demographics section asks pertinent questions about respondents' roles in the organization. This information can be analyzed to learn about interesting similarities and disconnects among departments, regions, job functions, age, and tenure within the company.
The Institute has designed the survey in coordination with values expert and analyst, Dr. William Loges, currently engaged at Oregon State University. Our experience with the survey allows us to describe with confidence the conditions that we encounter through an organization's responses. Moreover, the data can be analyzed in sophisticated ways to reveal more than a simple tally of the aggregate responses. Upon completion, the survey provides an excellent assessment tool for creating or revising a code of ethics and for designing the training to make the code stick.
Repeating the survey after a suitable amount of time can yield valuable results in measuring the success of your company's ethics program.
Focus Groups and Interviews
CCE also has the capability to explore attitudes and beliefs, legends, dilemmas, and trends through its interviews and focus groups. Working face to face can confirm what the survey finds as well as uncover rich detail that often is desired to explain survey responses. Conversations with the moral leaders of an organization can help CCE understand and decode the language, the traditions, the important stories, the industrial environment, and corporate policies necessary to construct an ethics program.