“The ERC is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, dedicated to independent research that advances high ethical standards and practices in public and private institutions.   With the global recession of the past year, we are also focusing closely on ethics and compliance aspects of the federal government’s response.  The American economy’s dislocation has been so severe, and the government’s strategy so massive and sweeping, that we are witnessing ethics issues never seen before here in the nation’s capital.”

- ERC President Patricia J. Harned

The Ethics Resource Centre

For the past 88 years, the Ethics Resource Centre (ERC) has been a source of information and guidance for ethics and compliance professionals everywhere. The information provided by the ERC serves as a benchmark for companies when gauging the success of their own ethics and compliance programs. The ERC conducts both national and private, single organization surveys, and publishes the results to help businesses and government agencies understand trends, gaps and best practices in ethics and compliance.

The ERC has launched a Student Fellows program targeted at secondary school students, to help instill ethics into their daily decisions. Emphasizing ethics and compliance at a young age helps prepare future business leaders by shaping them to be ethical thinkers. The ERC also provides information on developments and trends in federal legislation, regulations and ethics and compliance related court decisions. On the ERC website, they state, “we take advantage of its Washington, D.C. location to encourage understanding between business and the federal government.”

ERC Resources

The ERC houses countless ethics and compliance resources. The ERC releases a number of publications, survey and articles, as well as providing services to help companies develop, implement and measure their ethics and compliance programs. Here are some of the informative resources the ERC has to offer (all of the information and resources below are available on the ERC website):

Ethics Toolkit: The Ethics Toolkit contains a number of guides that outline tips and techniques for writing codes of conduct.

National Surveys- Data from the ERC is used widely throughout business, government and academia. According to the ERC under the “National Surveys” section of their website:

“As the only longitudinal survey measuring how employees at all levels in more than 3,000 U.S. workplaces view ethics within their own organizations, NBES is a valuable tool for business leaders, policymakers, boards of directors, ethics and compliance officers, consumers and investors  interested in monitoring ethics trends and better understanding ethical practices within organizations.”

Here are the links to the National Business Ethics Survey and some of its supplements:

• 2009 National Business Ethics Survey
• 2009 NBES Supplement: Ethics and Employee Engagement
• 2009 NBES Supplement: The Importance of Ethical Culture: Increasing Trust and Driving Down Risks
• 2009 NBES Supplement: Saving the Company Comes at a Cost: The Relationship Between Belt-Tightening Tactics and Increased Employee Misconduct

Publications: The ERC offers a number of articles and videos to assist companies in promoting ethics and compliance within their workforce. The ERC publishes a monthly newsletter entitled “Ethics Today,” which features ethics and compliance related articles and upcoming events. Every few weeks, the ERC publishes an EthicsStat- statistics that have been pulled from ERC research, surveys and other educational initiatives. The publications section also features a list of ethics and compliance books, staff articles and publications from groups partnered with the ERC.

Webcasts: The ERC provides a list of upcoming webcasts, as well as archiving past webcasts available for viewing free of charge. Webcasts cover issues including ethics and compliance risk, whistleblower rights, ethics and compliance programs, organizational culture and how to measure ethics and compliance programs.

Services: The ERC offers training and support services to help business leaders get the most out of their ethics and compliance programs. The ERC has created the “Benchmark Services Team,” to provide guidance on creating and issuing workplace ethics surveys, identifying ethics and compliance risk and measuring program effectiveness. There’s a lot that must be considered when developing and maintaining an effective ethics and compliance program. Services, such as these offered by the ERC, make it easier for business leaders, HR managers and ethics and compliance professionals to understand the information collected from workplace surveys and identify the next steps to overcome the identified challenges.

The Global Reporting Initiative is comprised of a very large group of experts who collaborate on the development of global standards for sustainability reporting. Joining the GRI is voluntary. With transparency and sustainability emerging as growing trends in the late 1990’s, the GRI was created to provide companies with a standardized sustainability reporting framework. Dissatisfied with the level of transparency in corporate reporting, the GRI works to make sustainability reporting mandatory, as opposed to voluntary. In a previous post, “Social Responsibility Reporting Best Practices: Allstate,” I discussed the application of the GRI reporting techniques at Allstate. The economic downturn has forced businesses and their leaders to make changes to their internal controls and business processes by adopting sustainable solutions.

The GRI provides guidance for these companies, offering best practice reporting solutions, through the implementation of the G3 Guidelines, to increase transparency and emphasize the need for sustainable business practices. Breaking the reporting process down into various components and serving as a resource of best practice reporting examples, the GRI makes sustainability reporting far less daunting.

About the Global Reporting Initiative

The vision of the GRI is the desire that the disclosure on economic, environmental, and social performance becomes as common and comparable as financial reporting, and as important to organizational success. Through the GRI Sustainability Reporting Framework, the GRI works to increase the transparency and exchange of sustainability related information. In 2009, GRI released the Amsterdam Declaration on Transparency and Reporting, which calls on the government in each country to make the disclosure of environmental, social and governance performance mandatory for companies. In the article “First GRI-Certified Training on Sustainable Reporting in Canada” Rock Lefebvre, Vice President, Research and Standards, at Certified General Accountants Association of Canada stated:

“The GRI Guidelines represent the best approach for achieving the goal of standardized sustainability reporting.”

The GRI and the G3 Guidelines have formed collaborative partnerships with the UN Environment Programme, the UN Global Compact and the Earth Charter Initiative. A number of documents and agreements from other organizations- such as the OECD and ILO, have also been referenced for the purpose of creating the G3 Guidelines.

Reporting Framework

In an overview provided by the GRI, the G3 Guidelines:

“Provide guidance for organizations to disclose their sustainability performance. It’s applicable to organizations of any size or type, and from any sector or geographic region, and has been used by thousands of organizations worldwide as the basis for their sustainability reporting. It facilitates transparency and accountability by organizations and provides stakeholders a universally-applicable, comparable framework from which to understand disclosed information. The Framework is continuously improved and expanded as knowledge of sustainability issues evolves and the needs of report makers and users change.”

The reporting framework provides guidance on setting report boundaries, defining report quality and report content. When following the G3 Guidelines, companies must also include a company profile, sustainability strategy, management approach and key performance indicators for measuring sustainability initiatives.  The GRI is continually involved in projects identifying and influencing the future trends related to sustainability.  These projects help the GRI remain on top of current issues and make updates to the guidelines. Updates are made to the reporting framework by category, instead of overhauling all guidelines at the same time. Guideline updates are shaped by stakeholder input and the outcomes of the projects GRI is involved with.

Important Documents

The GRI publishes reports related to the progress made in sustainability reporting, government commitment to sustainability, as well as the achievements and progress made at GRI. Each year, the GRI publishes their own sustainability reports and last year, published their first Year in Review report, documenting the organization’s progress towards established goals. A series of “Learning Publications” have been developed to assist business leaders integrate sustainability into their workplaces, beginning with basic concepts in reporting, understanding the value of sustainability reporting and innovative reporting examples.

Companies following the G3 reporting framework are invited to submit their reports to the GRI. In doing so, company names are added to a public list that’s made available on the GRI website. GRI has prepared a number of tools to provide report makers with assistance, as preparing a sustainability report for the first time can be overwhelming. Templates, software, training and sample reports are just a few of the solutions GRI has to offer to those responsible for publishing a company’s sustainability report.