// BY COLIN DYER – CEO, JONES LANG LASALLE
As the world’s leading integrated real estate services and money management firm, Jones Lang LaSalle has 33,000 employees spread across 170 offices on five continents. Our clients, who entrust us to manage their real estate, include some of the world’s most respected and recognized companies. They need to know that we are acting on their behalf with the highest level of integrity. If we don’t, we could be out of business…fast! Having an ethical culture is critical to attracting top talent to our firm—a business priority that can be especially challenging in emerging markets. Increasingly, recruits want us to prove to them that they will be working for a company that won’t run aground due to a major ethical lapse.
One of the greatest challenges for our senior management team is to ensure that all employees, regardless of their native culture or the language they speak, recognize that the company expects them to do the right thing each and every day. That is why our legal team created our Ethics Everywhere program, the goal of which is to infuse messages and training about the importance of integrity into every aspect of the employee life cycle. We know it’s not enough to simply provide an ethics training program when a new employee comes to work for us and then declare victory.
To reinforce an understanding of our core values, we make a point to communicate the importance of ethical business conduct whenever and wherever we can. In fact, we’ve made it a regular feature of our business messaging. We begin the process by mentioning ethics in our offer letters. We continue by having new hires read and agree to our Code of Business Ethics, which has been translated into 14 languages. And employees see ethics posters displayed in lunchrooms and receive wallet-sized reminders at meetings.
To further entrench our ideals in the minds of employees, our Ethics Officers (most of whom are drawn from our Legal staff) attend business meetings and lead discussions with employees about ethical dilemmas. Such activities encourage our people to think about how to handle some of the more nuanced situations they may face in the real world. These sessions require active participation because we don’t just want a “talking heads” presentation with a forgettable PowerPoint. We have also introduced an online interactive course for employees who provide building engineering and maintenance at our many locations around the globe. When employees leave the firm, we send them a reminder about their on-going obligations regarding confidential client and employee information they received while employed by Jones Lang LaSalle.
We also “ask and tell.” Our annual all-employee survey includes questions about the company’s ethical culture, and typically those questions receive the highest positive responses. The company also provides employees with an annual report about the operation of its ethics program, including metrics on how many matters were investigated, the types of complaints received, and how many employees were suspended or terminated (or, occasionally, went to jail) as a result of unethical or illegal conduct. It is important that our people know that there can be severe consequences to their careers if they ignore the rules for ethical business conduct.
Jones Lang LaSalle is perhaps proudest of its worldwide performance management program that requires employees, starting with the CEO, to commit to annual goals in writing through a uniform electronic process. Managers use the system to conduct annual employee reviews, which become the basis for determining incentive bonuses. To receive a bonus, everyone, including me, is required to re-certify to his or her commitment to the Code of Ethics. The norm, as you can well imagine, is 100 percent compliance.
When it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of an ethics communication and training program, the unfortunate reality is that even if you are successful in keeping significant ethical lapses away from your company, you can never really know whether you have been smart or just lucky. Since we began tracking our ethics metrics about five years ago, allegations of violations have not increased even though our company has doubled in revenue and the number of employees.
We believe these statistics demonstrate that our program has done a good job of enhancing our ethical culture and awareness. We are getting more inquiries from our people to our Ethics Officers asking what they should do before they do it, which, in our opinion, is a very healthy practice.
Tracking metrics has, parenthetically, permitted us to do something very useful: to spot trends or weaknesses. Then we can add policies and conduct focused training in order to stop problems from spinning out of control or becoming systemic. We all know that it is not enough just to tell people not to steal; you have to make it difficult for them to do so in the first place and you also have to be able to quickly detect when it has happened.
This is not just window-dressing, but rather good business. With over 30,000 people in our workforce, it is impossible to avoid ethical lapses. But nothing is more deflating to the organization than to find out that one of your colleagues has let you down by committing a fraud or mistreating another employee. And the costs of investigating issues and cleaning up after them, not to mention the loss of focus on the business, can be exorbitant. It is safe to say that what our shareholders want is for all of us to be out serving clients and generating revenue, not sitting in depositions.
