Establishing an Ethics Training Program

Katie Sutliff Lang
November 27, 2006

Every organization must deal with ethics. An ethical culture is essential for optimal productivity. After all, research shows that effective ethics training lowers the rates of misconduct within an organization. Also the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations (FSGO) encourage ethics training and ethical cultures, promising reduced fines and consequences for organizations that can prove that misconduct was the result of a “bad apple” rather than an unethical “tree.”

Your job as the ethics trainer is to promote the stated values of the organization and demonstrate to your employees that these values are foundational to the organization as a whole and are absolutely essential to its success.

Before creating and presenting an ethics training program, you must determine goals and objectives for the program. What end results do you want to achieve? Goals are the keystone to any training session and have critical implications for everything else involved in your training design and implication. You must also work through all the issues and questions that employees will have before the training process starts.

The process of ethics training development is identical to all effective training models:

1. Decide upon the goals.
2. Determine intended outcomes, which should be stated in terms of new skills and knowledge of the learner.
3. Create targets based on outcomes (for an ethics training, these could include quantifiable increases in awareness and usage of the company’s ethics hotline, a decrease in misconduct over time, etc.).
4. Evaluate potential strategies and resources that will most effectively accomplish your goals.
5. Organize your strategies into a training agenda.
6. Assemble (and, as needed, modify/create) training resources and materials.
7. Implement training.
8. Use evaluations and comparison to targets to determine effectiveness of training and need for modifications.
9. As needed, adjust training based on feedback and changing needs.

As you move from determining goals (and outcomes) to planning actions and activities, ensure that your training aligns with and meets your goals. Regardless of the delivery method you choose (in-person, video, online), it is important to ensure the training corresponds to the time and resources you have available. Organizational templates for different phases of the training process are provided in this paper.

This is the executive summary to a white paper by Katie Sutliff Lang entitled “Establishing an Ethics Training Program.” Read the complete paper at http://www.cunahrtdcouncil.org/tools/research.html.