What is your organization’s integrity quotient?
Global Integrity Report 2022 witnessed corporate India adjusting to the new normal with a renewed sense of purpose and documented how the resulting confusion put a dent in companies’ integrity agendas. In this year’s Global Integrity Report surveys, India secured the top spot for trust in employee integrity, with 98% of respondents agreeing.
When it came to factors why they felt compliance with integrity standards had improved, respondents felt it was mainly due to stricter regulations or pressure from regulators and law enforcement agencies, followed by direction from the management or leadership.
To foster a culture of trust and accountability, employees must be confident about their organizations’ compliance with integrity standards. Having confidence in their company’s commitment to ethics encourages employees to act responsibly, benefiting the organization’s reputation and public perception. For India Inc., interestingly, this confidence in organizations’ commitment to integrity is evident from the survey findings.
However, setting integrity standards is a continuous process and organizations must assess their priorities every few months. When asked what they considered being the most important areas for their organization’s ongoing integrity standards in the next two years, respondents prioritized the need for awareness, training, and communications (35%), followed by risk assessment activities (24%).
Is your organization rethinking its whistleblower protocols?
In ever-evolving corporate environments, robust whistleblowing mechanisms can set the tone just right for an organization’s integrity agenda. In our survey, 32% said people were now more concerned about reporting misconduct than they were two years ago. With tech-interference, whistleblowing helplines are much more secure and enable complainants to voice their concerns without the fear of retaliation. Almost half (46%) respondents agreed that current solutions for whistleblowing were more advanced and offered greater anonymity and flexibility to raise concerns.
By opening a channel of communication between the employees and decisionmakers, a sound whistleblowing function can build trust and accountability and its proactive use can guide policy improvements, ethical training programs for continuous enhancement of the ethics framework. Encouragingly, 77% of respondents strongly agreed that the employees in their organizations could report wrongdoing at work without fearing negative consequences for themselves. Meanwhile, 45% felt it had become easier for employees to report their concerns in the last two years, a significant drop from 62% in 2022. 41% said whistleblowers were now offered more protection from retaliation in their organization.
However, even with widespread awareness about the mechanism and no fear of retaliation for reporting instances of wrongdoing, only 50% admitted they had personally reported issues of misconduct in the last two years. This is concerning, considering 48% respondents shared that they had concerns about misconduct that they had not reported in the last two years.