Ethical Culture Accelerator
Would your employees speak up when it counts?
A benchmarked employee survey that measures whether your people would report misconduct — and shows how you compare to peer compliance programs.
5M+
culture data points from real client assessments
Two lenses
employee perception matched to program design data
Survey → action
board-ready findings and the tools to close the gaps
What it is
An employee survey that shows whether your program works in practice.
An Ethical Culture Assessment measures whether employees would speak up, trust reporting channels, fear retaliation, and see leaders act with integrity. It’s built for ethics and compliance, not HR.
Training completions and hotline counts describe activity. Employee perception data is evidence. Ethisphere measures it across the Eight Pillars of Ethical Culture and benchmarks it against peers, so you know where you stand, what good looks like, and what to do next.
What gets measured
- Comfort speaking up, and what stops people
- Fear of retaliation, by team and region
- Organizational justice and manager credibility
- Whether people see leaders act with integrity
- Pressure to compromise on ethics to hit targets
Your board deck
Saying you’d speak up isn’t the same as speaking up.
What employees sayOr plot your own gap · 3 questions · 2 minutes
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1 · How you measure
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2 · What employees say
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3 · What employees do
How does your program measure ethical culture today?
Select all that apply. We’ll compare your mix to the World’s Most Ethical Companies Honorees.
Share of 2026 World’s Most Ethical Companies Honorees (n = 138) using each method.
What percentage of your employees say they would report misconduct if they saw it?
Usually from your engagement or culture survey. Most programs score high here.
Of employees who observed misconduct, what percentage say they reported it?
The harder number. Many programs don't ask this yet.
Your board likely sees “would report.” “Reported it” tells you whether speak-up works when it counts.
Get your board deck
Where should we send your slide?
16 slides matched to your industry, with your numbers built in.
An Ethisphere rep will email you within two business days to schedule your walkthrough.
You're all set.
Your Ethisphere rep will email you at within two business days to schedule a 30-minute walkthrough of your board deck.
Want to pick a time now?
Sources: Ethisphere 2026 World’s Most Ethical Companies benchmark data (n = 138); Ethisphere ethical culture benchmark, 2024–2025 employee surveys.
The business case
Why boards want culture data.
Measuring your culture of compliance gives you evidence for the question regulators already ask: does your program work in practice?
96%
of 2026 World’s Most Ethical Companies Honorees report culture results to the board or a board committee
97%
turned culture results into new communications, training, or initiatives
87%
bring in a third party to develop or run their culture surveys
5M+
culture data points behind every Ethisphere benchmark
Source: Ethisphere 2026 World’s Most Ethical Companies benchmark data.
Your other data shows what gets reported. It can’t show what gets held back.
The data most E&C teams already have doesn’t measure or ask employees directly whether they feel safe to speak up, and that’s the question boards and regulators want answered.
| You already have | What it tells you | What it can’t tell you |
|---|---|---|
| Hotline and case data | How many reports came in, and what kind. | Who saw misconduct and stayed silent, and why. |
| HR engagement surveys | Satisfaction, retention risk, and manager effectiveness. | Whether people fear retaliation or trust leaders to act on an ethics concern. |
| Training completion and attestations | Who finished the course and signed the code. | Whether anyone would apply it under pressure. |
| Exit interviews | Why people chose to leave. | What the people who stayed are seeing today. |
| Audits and investigations | What went wrong, after the fact. | Early warning signs in the parts of the business that haven’t surfaced yet. |
What a speak-up survey adds
It asks your employees directly.
Hears the silence
Finds the people who saw misconduct and didn’t report it, and what stopped them.
Measures fear and trust
Retaliation concerns, organizational justice, and confidence in leadership across the Eight Pillars of Ethical Culture.
Pinpoints where
Results cut by location, function, and level, so you fix the right team instead of retraining everyone.
Shows it works in practice
Benchmarked against 5M+ culture data points, so your board and regulators see evidence.
Regulators expect it
How often and how does the company measure its culture of compliance? Does the company seek input from all levels of employees…? What steps has the company taken in response?
U.S. Department of Justice, Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs (ECCP)
How often A recurring assessment, with pulses between cycles
All levels Results cut by department, location, and role
In response Recommendations and a record of the actions you took
Why Ethisphere
Anyone can survey your employees. Ethisphere can tell you why the answers look that way.
Regulators ask what your program does and whether it works in practice. Ethisphere holds the data to answer both, side by side in the Ethisphere Platform.
Program reality
What leading programs do
The Ethics Quotient®, the 240+ question framework behind nearly two decades of program assessments
Employee perception
Whether it works for your people
The Eight Pillars of Ethical Culture, benchmarked against 5M+ culture data points
A diagnosis
The reason behind your score
One view of program design and employee experience
Meet you where you are
Pick the level of support your ethical culture program needs.
Some teams need their first full read. Some need a fast check on one part of the business. Some have strong ethical cultures and want to keep them that way. Every option draws on the same benchmark, so your data builds year over year.
We run it with you
Full Ethical Culture Assessment
Your complete baseline across all Eight Pillars. Our ethical culture experts design the survey, run it, compare your results to peers, and present findings your board can act on.
- Survey design and administration
- Custom peer benchmarks
- Prioritized recommendations
- A board-ready findings presentation
Best when you’ve never formally measured, or it’s time for a full refresh.
Included in Business Ethics Leadership Alliance (BELA) Plus and Pinnacle, or on its own
You run it, we benchmark it
Pulse Surveys
Quick reads on any team, region, or moment. Launch a short survey from expert-built templates whenever you need one, and see results benchmarked automatically.
- Unlimited surveys every year
- Questions built for ethics and compliance programs.
- Dashboards with automatic benchmarks
- Results by team, location, or your own variables
Best when you want to check a hotspot, test a new initiative, or track change between full assessments.
Included in every BELA tier
We supply it, you deploy it
Culture Campaigns and Toolkits
Ready-made content to close the gaps your survey finds or reinforce what’s working between surveys.
- Communications campaigns and micro-learning
- Manager toolkits and discussion guides
- Videos, Ethitoons™, posters, and quizzes
- Speak-up, non-retaliation, pressure, and justice topics
Best when your results flagged a pillar to fix.
Included in BELA Plus and Pinnacle, or on its own
Most of this comes with BELA membership.
Pulse surveys and benchmarking of your existing data come with every BELA tier. The full assessment and culture campaigns come with BELA Plus and Pinnacle, along with the peer community and resources of membership
How it runs
An ongoing cycle.
81% of 2026 World’s Most Ethical Companies Honorees run a dedicated ethical culture survey. Leading programs repeat it every one to two years and pulse in between. Your Ethisphere culture team is with you at every step.
54%
of 2026 leading organizations run pulse surveys several times a year between full assessments.
Full assessment
Every one to two years
Pulse
In between
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Step 1
Plan
Align on goals, demographics, and languages with your culture team, or launch instantly from an expert-built template.
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Step 2
Measure
Deploy the survey with proven methods that protect anonymity and drive response rates.
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Step 3
Benchmark
See results against your industry, size, and regulatory complexity, with expert analysis of what matters most.
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Step 4
Act
Get findings, recommendations, on-demand reports for every leader, and a plan to close the gaps.
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Step 5
Sustain
Keep ethical culture strong between surveys with ready-made campaigns, manager toolkits, and micro-learning, then pulse to confirm it's working.
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In between
Pulse
- After a key moment: a reorg, an investigation, an acquisition.
- Read a single team, region, or site where the full survey flagged a gap.
- Check progress on your action plan and confirm the changes are landing.
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Every one to two years
Re-assess
Run the full survey again every one to two years and measure the change against your last baseline.
In their words
What measurement changed for them.
A month of work, back
“The on-demand reporting saved me. I’ve done probably 15 reports, and if each of those was going to take me two days, it saved me a month of work. The reports are in my inbox in five minutes.”
Janet Alves, Director of Compliance Programs, AES
Hard data on culture
“The assessment is really a great tool to gather hard data to validate that belief and also identify potential areas of opportunity to improve the culture.”
Craig Pedersen, Director, Global Compliance and Ethics Program, PepsiCo
Improvement you can measure
“From an ethical culture assessment perspective we scored 4.7 points above external benchmarking, so we’re outperforming our peers on all the different pillars.”
Hentie Dirker, Chief ESG and Integrity Officer, AtkinsRéalis
Questions CECOs ask
Measuring ethical culture, answered.
How do you measure ethical culture?
Through an employee perception survey built for ethics and compliance. It measures speak-up comfort, fear of retaliation, organizational justice, pressure to compromise, and perceptions of managers and leaders. Ethisphere measures these as the Eight Pillars of Ethical Culture and benchmarks results against 5M+ culture data points.
What does the DOJ ECCP say about speak-up culture?
The U.S. Department of Justice Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs asks how often and how a company measures its culture of compliance, whether it seeks input from all levels of employees, and what it did in response. An Ethical Culture Assessment answers all three.
What’s the difference between speak-up culture and a whistleblower program?
A whistleblower program is infrastructure: reporting channels, hotlines, and case management. Speak-up culture is behavior: whether employees use those channels, trust the process, and act without fear of retaliation. Hotline data shows who reported. Only an Ethical Culture Assessment explains why others stayed silent.
How is this different from our HR engagement survey?
An engagement survey measures whether employees like their jobs. An Ethical Culture Assessment measures whether they would report an ethical concern, and compares the answer to peer compliance programs. The two run side by side, and HR gets a view of cultural risk their instrument wasn’t designed to capture.
How often should you assess your ethical culture?
Regulators expect recurring culture measurement. Many programs run a full assessment on a one- to two-year cycle and use pulse surveys in between for specific teams, regions, or emerging risks.
Can we benchmark our existing employee survey data?
Yes. We compare the ethics and compliance questions in your existing survey against our ethical culture benchmark, with no new survey required.
Request a meeting
See Ethisphere’s Ethical Culture Assessment in action.
A conversation with our team about how Ethisphere plans, runs, and helps you act on your speak-up culture survey.
In your meeting
- A live tour of the survey platform and results dashboards
- How your results would compare against the benchmark
- The manager toolkits and compliance resources that close the gaps
- Pricing and packaging, including what comes with BELA