Tone at the Top: Top Ways for Leaders to Advance Ethics and Compliance
Tone at the top is essential to a robust ethics and compliance program, with strong leadership driving a culture of integrity and accountability.
Strong ethics is good business. Organizations with robust ethics and compliance practices outperform.
Senior executives play a major role in fostering a culture of compliance. Executives set an example for all employees on ethical leadership. Their actions show business priorities. They also demonstrate how the company’s values become real actions.
How can we engage senior leaders to communicate about ethics and compliance effectively and genuinely? In this blog, we explain how.
What is Tone at the Top and Why is it Important?
The phrase “Tone at the Top” refers to the climate of ethics in an organization as established by the Board and senior executives. Compliance leaders use the term to discuss how senior executives promote business integrity.
The tone from the top is important for setting expectations in an organization. It shows why following the code of conduct matters. It also helps ensure that business practices align with the organization’s values and principles. In short, doing business the right way.
If you’re looking to convince your senior executives about the importance of tone at the top, here are three good reasons:
1. Ethics is Good Business: Tone at the top is essential to a robust ethics and compliance program. And those who have strong programs and practices, outperform. Case in point: the publicly traded World’s Most Ethical Companies outperformed comparable peers by 12.3% over the past five years.
2. It’s Important to Employees: By 2025, 27% of the workforce will be Gen Z – this demographic wants to work for organizations with strong values and a commitment to social issues. Leaders drive these qualities and priorities.
3. It Fosters a Robust Culture: Senior executives model business integrity through transparency, accountability and collaborative decision-making. This provides a model for all leaders and fosters an environment where employees feel comfortable speaking up.
Tone at the Top: Steps for Success
Once you’ve got your executive team on board, how do you help them foster tone at the top? Here are some tips:
• Vary Messaging: Leaders should communicate about ethics, compliance, and company values as part of planned and unplanned events. Provide speaking points so they can integrate stories and key points into their conversations. Ethics and compliance should become a natural part of your leadership’s tone and talk tracks.
• Reach all Audiences: In most companies, not all employees sit at desks with a computer. How do you make sure you reach all your workforce, from those in the office to those in the field and factory floor? The key is to use different messengers, messages, and modalities to communicate to employees across the organization.
For example, a mining company changed the content of communications by audience. Their truckers and miners received safety, anti-corruption, and environmental communication. The financial teams received accurate records, bribery, anti-corruption, and other role-focused messages. Although the content was different, all communications featured the company values.
• Use Many Voices: The CEO isn’t the only one responsible for setting tone at the top. The voice of ethics has to be consistent across the executive team to have impact and credibility. As such, you should feature a broad range of executives in communications to ensure employees recieve the message from different voices.
For example, the Chief Human Resources officer can speak about harassment and discrimination; the Chief Legal Officer can share stories about the importance of anti-corruption; the top Sales executive can discuss gifts and entertainment. Hearing these messages from a range of executives helps to reinforce that the organization takes ethics and compliance seriously.
• Make it Real: Use storytelling, company examples, and case studies to add impact to messaging. As an ethics and compliance professional, you can provide examples for leaders. Ensure that they focus on ‘lessons learned’. Have them share what went well, such as how an employee spoke up when they saw something that wasn’t right.
Encourage leadership to share personal stories from executives. Ask them to share stories about ethics. For example, they could talk about a colleague who demonstrated strong values and the impact it had. They could also discuss an ethical dilemma they faced and how they dealt with it.
Addressing Key Challenges to Cultivating Tone at the Top
At Ethisphere, we recognize the World’s Most Ethical Companies®–we see a lot of senior leaders who believe in ethics and compliance and are actively amplifying the importance of business integrity. This approach, however, isn’t always the case. What can you do to get your team on board?
A few tips:
• Align to Business Strategy. Look at your organization’s top goals and consider how ethics and compliance can be a boost to the bottom line. For example: if a goal is to attract new talent, share data about the importance of ethics to employee groups you are looking to recruit. There is great data (including Ethisphere’s Ethics Premium) that validates that strong ethics is good business.
• Make it Easy: As we all know, executives are busy, so if you can do the work to develop and provide assets for executive comms teams, it will go a long way to ensure success. At Ethisphere, we offer a range of communications, tools and resources to enable executives to easily get the word out – including sample blog posts, emails, clever cartoons, and more.
• Share Examples: Provide examples of how other leaders are sharing their organization’s values and commitment to integrity. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella’s Blog on Security, that aligns key business strategy and the organization’s commitment to trust. CareFirst launched a publicly available ‘Speak Up’ report that shares the organization’s—and the CEO’s—commitment to ethical behavior and transparency.
• Track Results and Report Back: If you share a video of the CEO on the intranet and it resonates with employees, share that data with the executive team. Employee surveys like an ethical culture assessment, offer important insights and data that shows how employees feel about leadership and their commitment to tone at the top.
Ethics and compliance teams typically run lean and going the extra mile to get senior leadership involved can add effort to an already lengthy list of deliverables. However, engaging executives to amplify the importance of doing business with integrity reaps endless rewards. After all, everyone wants to work for an organization that has purpose, accountability, and ethics.
Learn more about Ethisphere’s Ethical Culture Accelerator assessment and library of ready-to-go content, including a newly released Kit focused on Senior Leader Communications.
