Most US Workers Would Not Report Misconduct - Training Makes a Difference

Effective training programs teach employees how to report misconduct. Early reporting helps to curb issues before they spiral out of control. That’s a good thing. Despite some popular opinion, “whistleblower” is not a bad word.  You want some good whistleblowers.

According to a recently published Spherion Workplace Snapshot survey, more than 1/3 of U.S. adults surveyed have witnessed unethical activities at their workplace, but only 47% are likely to report it.

What encourages employees to report? A strong ethical culture. According to the Ethics Resource Center, employees in organizations that have a strong ethical culture are about 30% more likely to report misconduct than those in organizations with a weak ethical culture

Effective, high quality training is critical to that culture, because it brings your policies (which few people read, by the way) to life. It puts them in context, makes them memorable, and allows people to incorporate the fundamentals into their everyday work lives.

The most common forms of ethical breaches relate to bread and butter employment law issues. This is why basic employment law training (with a focus on harassment and discrimination prevention) continues to form the foundation of employer’s compliance training programs.  According to 2005 statistics compiled by the Open Ethics & Compliance Group (OCEG – www.oceg.org), 60-70% of complaints made via employer ethics “hotlines” are HR and employment law related.

Is it any wonder employers care most about their ethics and employment law training programs? I continue to see the trend of organizations placing the most effort and care in their ethics & code of conduct training, and their harassment and discrimination prevention training. While other specialized topics are important (e.g. antitrust, FCPA), they are dwarfed by the basics.

Make sure your “basics” are as effective as they can be.

Tags: compliance training, Federal Harassment Training, HR reporting, misconduct reporting, whistleblower, Workplace Harassment,