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With increasing knowledge of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines Requirements, Ethics and “Code of Conduct” training is becoming more and more popular. The topics that employers choose to emphasize in ethics training tends to be driven by two factors: (1) prevalent areas of risk for that particular organization / industry, and (2) whatever’s making the news.

The first driver makes sense. For example, if your company has substantial international operations, basic education on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) is likely important. An organization with a significant sales operation tends to care about anti-trust. Most publicly traded companies want a baseline established when it comes to insider trading rules.

The second driver is a little more tricky. The ethical meltdowns that hit newspaper headlines aren’t necessarily highly relevant to every employer. For example, while some companies are concerned about pretexting given the HP investigation scandal from 2006, when you consider a typical employer’s compliance and risk profile, pretexting just isn’t a “top ten” issue. (For those of you who need a quick primer, pretexting involves misrepresenting your identity to gain access to privileged information – like financial records, or telephone records.)

We’d like to think that childish, boorish and demeaning antics only happen at “those other” companies; the ones with different values, cultures, and an unchecked workforce. But the reality is that every organization has the potential not just for isolated instances of egregious misconduct, but also for more widespread, systemic conduct – the kind of misconduct that creates significant legal risk and can destroy the culture and reputation you’ve worked so hard to build.

Case in point: EMC.  Today’s Wall Street Journal piece on the data storage giant is a doozy: A Data-Storage Titan Confronts Bias Claims.

Seventeen former saleswomen filed suit against EMC back in 2004 and they’re now seeking class action status. The plaintiffs are claiming discrimination and harassment – and the allegations are pretty old school, not to mention, a PR disaster – locker room antics, company paid visits to strip clubs, demeaning sexual remarks, and retaliation against women who complained about the hostile atmosphere.

EMC denies the allegations and is fighting the class certification, as well as the lawsuit.

I came across an interesting article in last month’s National Law Journal that highlights the growing trend of individual manager liability for employment litigation. (Employment Litigation Gets Personal for Company Managers: More executives sued personally for workplace actions).  It’s a reminder of why comprehensive ethics and legal compliance training should reach everyone in the organization – even the execs who presumably “know all the rules.”

Individual managers have been named in lawsuits for years. The risk of personal liability is extremely stressful and can put enormous pressure on an employer to settle even the most frivolous lawsuits. But what’s new is the rate and frequency that managers are being named as parties to lawsuits, and who’s being named as a party. Plaintiffs aren’t just targeting frontline managers who have extensive employee contact – they’re reaching to the top of the house and targeting high profile executives. The hottest new trend for personal exec liability? Wage and hour violations, which can easily run into the millions of dollars.