Business Ethics Practice

Business ethics encompasses the rules, roles, and values that inform ethical conduct. It is the context of compliance behavior, risk management, business strategy and growth. Click here for the steps that organizations can take to integrate ethics and compliance and create value. ITAP understands both the global and local implications of business ethics, and offers a variety of services to help you strengthen the ethics in your organization:

Ethics Training: Promote ethical conduct by developing awareness and communication skills.
Online Ethics Training: Provide stand-alone e-courses as well as online pre-work and refreshers to enhance face-to-face ethical conduct training.
Learning Needs Assessment: Identify the most relevant learning objectives for ethical conduct training.
Ethical Culture Audit: Identify the levers that promote ethical conduct in your organization.
The Team Risk Profiler: Identify and overcome barriers to ethical conduct in teams.
Individual Risk Profiler: Identify and overcome barriers to ethical conduct.
Assessing the Impact of Learning: Determine whether workshops and training have the desired effect.
Culturally Appropriate Communication:
- Code of Conduct: Communicate your organization's Code of Conduct across cultures and languages.
- Ethics Hotline: Ensure that your hotline communication scripts meet the needs of your diverse base of managers, employees, suppliers, and service providers.

Ethics Training

Clients' needs vary across the globe. In the USA, ITAP's courses are interactive and rely on role plays and other exercises. Our curricula and course design are consistent with the Advisory Group of the U.S. Sentencing Commission's statement that "communicating standards and procedures through written documentation … is unlikely to be effective in motivating employees to comply over time" (Report of the Ad Hoc Advisory Group on the Organizational Sentencing Guidelines, October 7, 2003, p. 70). In Europe, the emphasis ITAP's training is on social responsibility and managing the relationship with stakeholders. And in Asia, where the backdrop of ethics training is anti-corruption campaigns and legal reforms, our focus is on best practices and risk management.

Globally, ITAP's interactive workshops aim to strengthen ethical conduct by linking awareness and communication skills to distinct business contexts:

the organization's code of conduct, policies and procedures
interaction with clients: attracting and contracting new business
interaction with suppliers: identifying and awarding contracts.

Ethics Training Workshops

Strengthening Commitment to Compliance: Managing motives that conflict with ethical conduct.

Business Ethics Across Cultures: Navigating in a business world in which a best practice in one culture is unethical in another.

Ethical Conduct and Clients: Anticipating and managing social barriers to ethical behavior.

Ethics and Cultural Diversity: Drawing on shared cultural values to strengthen ethical conduct.

Ethical Conduct at the Workplace: Overcoming common barriers to ethical conduct.

We also offer tools to enable participants to continue the learning past the training event:

The Cultural Drivers of Commitment Card™: Diagnose and manage the cultural drivers that underlie the routine expression of commitment to compliance.
The Social Drivers of Commitment Card™: Identify the stakeholders behind alternative courses of action and focus on the relationships that support the best outcome.
The Task Components Card™: Identify and communicate the specific actions that a rule or regulation requires.

Organizations can draw on ITAP's international network of trainers, or contract train-the-train sessions from ITAP to certify their own in-house trainers.

To view a description of our workshops, click here.

Online Ethics Training

E-courses offer organizations the capability to upgrade the knowledge and skills of their people simultaneously across geographies, languages and cultures.

E-learning is used as a cost-effective substitute to face-to-face learning, and to engage managers and employees who have missed face-to-face learning opportunities, or need a refresher or a business simulation. Some of ITAP's e-modules are designed as pre-work, familiarizing participants with the requisite vocabulary and concepts used in face-to-face training.

ITAP can launch customized online ethical conduct workshops in as little as six weeks. Its e-courses are consistent with IMS-SCORM standards.

Learning Needs Assessment

If your organization is seeking ethical conduct training, what awareness and skills should the training emphasize? We can help you prioritize the most relevant learning objectives to ensure that your managers and employees have the skills to act on the knowledge that they gain from issue-specific courses on compliance. Managers and employees typically need to be able to:

recognize situations that pose an ethical dilemma
identify situations that fall under compliance
diagnose and manage motives that conflict with ethical standards
confidently communicate about ethical and compliance challenges:
- raising red flags
- following up with colleagues and superiors
- providing constructive feedback
sustain their commitment to ethics and compliance guidelines over time.

Ethical Culture Audit

What levers promote ethical standards in your organization? ITAP's Ethical Culture Audit identifies the unique problems and pressure points in your organization. The audit begins at the micro behavioral level with the Team Risk Profiler™, a tool that identifies the circumstances in which a team may be predisposed to violate the rules and norms of the organization. We then identify the underlying systemic causes for these risk factors. We review the business environment, relationship with customers and suppliers, roles and responsibilities, communication, and management / leadership style. Our goal is to identify actions that will close the gap between the current and desired state of ethics in your organization.

Team Risk Profiler

What are the vulnerabilities of your team? What situations may predispose it to overlook rules and regulations? The Team Risk Profiler is an application of the Culture in the Workplace Questionnaire™ that explores a team's vulnerabilities. It is used to design customized team interventions.

For example, a team that emphasizes sharing is likely to encourage its members to share information. In contrast, a team that regards information as a source of power is likely to encourage its members to hold back. When the cultural drivers behind these behavioral tendencies are very strong, individuals may be predisposed to act in conformity with their team culture regardless of the rules and regulations.

Based on the Team Risk Profiler, ITAP may recommend a customized intervention to initiate change at both the behavioral and systemic levels.

Individual Risk Profiler

Help your managers and employees identify and overcome their own individual barriers to compliance. This confidential application of the Culture in the Workplace Questionnaire™ is used to explore behavioral preferences that may pose an ethics and/or compliance risk. For example, an individual who has a strong need for certainty may refrain from taking required action when the consequences of the required action are unknown. On the other hand, an individual who is very tolerant of ambiguity may ignore circumstances in which a rule or regulation is not followed.

The Individual Risk Profiler is used in workshops to strengthen ethical conduct. Managers and employees learn about the behavioral preferences that may prevent them from fully and effortlessly complying with workplace rules and regulations. They then practice a method of connecting their behavioral preferences with the desired compliance outcomes.

Assessing the Impact of Learning

Does the training have the desired impact? ITAP partners with clients to assess whether:

the training meets participants' expectations
participants have learned new skills and knowledge
participants have integrated their new skills and knowledge into their work
business performance has improved

For action learning teams, ITAP offers the Action Learning Team Process Questionnaire™ (ALTPQ). This tool offers external and internal facilitators insight into problem areas that need improvement.

Culturally Appropriate Communication

Code of Conduct

Who is the target audience of your organization's Code of Conduct? Are there language and culture differences among the audience members? ITAP partners with organizations to evaluate the communication needs of your audience, and ensure that the Code of Conduct conveys the same message across cultures and languages.

Ethics Hotline Script

Does your organization maintain a hotline for complaints and tips? Calls and emails to your hotline may come from any location in which your organization has a presence. ITAP can help you ensure that your organization's hotline communication scripts meet the needs of your diverse base of managers, employees, suppliers, and service providers.

Ethics and Compliance Resources

Center for Ethical Business Cultures
Ethics and Compliance Officer Association
Ethics Resource Center
European Business Ethics Deutschland
Governance
Health Care Compliance Association
International Business Ethics Institute
International Compliance Association
International Society of Business, Economics, and Ethics
Open Compliance & Ethics Group
Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics
The Business Ethics Network of Africa

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