In Promoting Ethics, Tyco International Said: 'Let's Keep It Simple,' Ethikos Reports

MAMARONECK, N.Y., May 25 /PRNewswire/ -- About a year and a half ago, Tyco International, Ltd. conducted a cultural diagnostic survey to assess what its employees were thinking about ethics and compliance.

There was good news and bad news. At the top of the company—e.g., senior managers—there was strong support for ethics and compliance, recalls Matthew O. Tanzer, the company's vice president and chief compliance counsel.

But in the lower reaches, things were different. While "not terrible," support for ethics and compliance was softer.

That survey, developed by the Conference Board's Council on Corporate Ethics and Compliance, served as a "wake-up call," recalls Tanzer.

Admittedly, one might find this sort of ethics gap at many companies. But Tyco wanted to do better with its middle managers, supervisors, and "ground-level" employees.

(Tyco, with about 100,000 employees, specializes in security and protection devices and has U.S. headquarters in Princeton, N.J.)

Tanzer gathered his compliance team and brainstormed: How do we reach this audience?

In the end, they said, "Let's keep it simple." They settled on a model borrowed from the corporate safety area, "toolbox talks."

Toolbox talks? In some organizations, managers deliver a safety talk about a specific subject at the beginning of the work shift. These typically encompass a brief (two- to five-minute) interactive discussion.

With Tyco's ethics initiative, managers would choose from pre-developed scenarios to generate discussion on various compliance topics like expense-report fraud or conflicts of interest.

They built a website where the managers could pick up the materials (e.g., scenarios and facilitators' guide, including "talking points"). And they made it clear that this was a requirement, a goal in managers' "fiscal year 2010 documented goals and objectives."

In the end, more than 1,300 managers conducted ethics conversations with their teams—during regular, planned meetings, not a special "compliance meeting." It was all part of the effort to "get at the culture" of the company and its 100,000 employees, Tanzer tells Ethikos in its May/June issue. (See http://EthikosPublication.com/html/tyco.html.)

Now in its 23rd year, Ethikos (www.EthikosPublication.com) takes a unique case-study approach to corporate ethics. Recent issues have included profiles of General Electric, USAA, Coca-Cola, Cisco, McDonald's, British Telecom, AOL, and Novartis, among others. To see selected recent articles go to: http://www.ethikospublication.com/html/selectedarticles.html

SOURCE Ethikos