Sure We Have an Ethics Program, but is it Effective? Conducting Ethical Climate Surveys in Higher Education

September 3, 2018

As compliance and audit professionals, we all support robust compliance and ethics programs but we must also ensure that those programs are “effective.” This is sometimes easier said than done. One mechanism to guide the discussion is an ethical climate survey, which can be tailored to your specific institutional culture. This article will discuss some of the lessons learned while conducting initial ethical climate surveys at Emory University and Rice University.

It is one thing to have a hotline but do people feel comfortable calling it? Do they feel like calling it will help them? An ethical climate survey is one of the best ways to understand your culture.

WHY DO IT?

There is likely a lot that is unknown about your institution’s culture. For example, you may not know the level of
awareness regarding your institution’s compliance-related resources, such as the hotline or other mechanisms for reporting wrongdoing and getting advice on compliance and ethics issues. You also may not know the level of trust or the community’s perception of those resources. It is one thing to have a hotline but do people feel comfortable calling it? Do they feel like calling it will help them?

An ethical climate survey is one of the best ways to understand your culture. For new programs, this can provide a baseline, or help you focus your energy. For existing programs, conducting the climate survey periodically over time also allows you to track your progress on addressing deficiencies and to identify new problem areas, should any arise.

Additionally, climate surveys help your organization fulfill the requirements for an “effective compliance and ethics program” contained in the United States Sentencing Commission Guidelines Manual for Organizations (“USSG”). Section 8B2.1(5)(B) requires organizations to periodically evaluate the effectiveness of their compliance and ethics programs. Finally, the survey itself will raise ethics awareness on campus and convey a
message that the university really does care about doing the right thing.

HOW TO DO IT?

When conducting an ethical climate survey at your institution, there are a variety of issues to consider regarding the design and distribution of the survey and the analysis of the results. Below are some of the major issues and considerations you may confront.

Goals

You should clearly articulate what you want to accomplish with the survey, as this will drive many of the decisions related to design and distribution. For example, is your goal to test awareness only, or are you looking to understand comfort level and trust? Are you looking to understand how certain populations relate to the institution or to each other?

Design

One major design consideration is the target audience. At institutions of higher education, faculty, staff, students, contractors, and others (e.g., volunteers) are all potential respondents to an ethical climate survey. There are also varying degrees of association with your institution within each of these categories. For example, if you decide to include all faculty and staff, do you want to include adjunct faculty and part-time employees? And if you decide to include contractors, do you want to include all contractors or just those with a major presence on your campus? How you define your target audience depends on the specifics of your institution, so it is worth obtaining input from the relevant individuals.

The first design question is determining what level of demographic information is necessary to achieve the defined goals. The advantage of collecting demographic data is that you can identify correlations between demographic characteristics and responses to other questions in the survey. However, the risk of collecting demographic data is that if it is too specific, it can have a chilling effect and lower survey response (as respondents may feel like their responses may negatively come back to them). For example, if a department has only three people in it, it may be easy to identify a survey respondent. Therefore, it is important to collect demographic data that is specific enough to be useful but general enough to preserve the anonymity of the respondent. A good starting point is employment category, school, and length of service. You can also include categories such as gender, race, or age; however, if adding these categories, make sure that you are coordinating with Equal Employment Opportunity, Title IX, and General Counsel.

Developing the survey itself requires reflection on your institution and your underlying goals. To be meaningful it should be tailored to your institution. As you design the content of the survey, it is important to bring in relevant stakeholders for input and vetting. Although this process will vary by institution, some of the offices you will probably want to review the survey include human resources, the provost’s office, the general counsel’s office, various offices in business and finance, and relevant committees, such as the executive compliance committee. It is also a good idea to get assistance from your organization’s institutional research office or someone with experience in survey methodology to help craft questions and their response schemas.

Finally, you may consider how the ethical climate survey relates to other survey activities, such as those related to faculty, Title IX and sexual harassment. You want to make sure that they do not unduly overlap or conflict. You may also be able to combine multiple efforts, if that will not compromise your goals.

Distribution

The distribution of the survey is as important as the design. If you design a perfect survey but fail to get a sufficient level of responses, then you will be missing out on the most valuable fruits of the process—actionable data.

The first step is choosing a survey platform. There are numerous electronic survey platforms available, and the functions they have available can vary, but most of them will meet your basic needs. Rice used the Qualtrics platform and Emory used RedCap, which was built for clinical research surveys but is suitable for organizational surveys as well.

One thing to consider is whether you will require institutional login credentials to access the survey. The advantages of doing so are that it makes it impossible for outside parties who have access to the survey link (e.g., if it were forwarded by an employee) to complete it. It also prevents employees from completing the survey multiple times. This ensures the integrity of the data to the highest degree.

The drawback to requiring institutional login credentials is that survey responses are not completely anonymous because respondents’ data and identity are connected in the survey database. If some of your survey questions are highly sensitive (e.g., “Have you witnessed fraud?”), then individuals may not be comfortable answering if they think they are being tracked. To reduce this concern, you can assure respondents that their responses will be anonymous by providing an open survey link that can be accessed without login credentials. You will be at risk of receiving duplicate responses and responses from outside parties, but you can reduce the effects by obtaining a large sample size and ensuring that you only send the survey to individuals with institutional email addresses.

The most efficient method for distributing the survey to the target audience is through email. The email invitation should include basic information about the survey, who is conducting it and for what purpose, and how the data will be used. It should also assure recipients that the survey is confidential and that no one will make any attempt to ascertain their identity. This information should also be included in the introductory section of the survey itself. You want the email itself to come from someone high up in the organization and you may want different individuals to send to different groups (e.g., have Academic Affairs send to faculty and Human Resources send to staff).

There are several other design elements to consider. First, not all of your employees have access to a computer (such as facilities or maintenance), so you should consider alternative methods to capture this demographic. Rice, for example, set up laptops in convenient locations so employees could complete the survey during shift changes and also made paper surveys available for those who were unable to complete the survey online. Second, you want to be accessible, both to individuals with disabilities and to individuals who speak other languages. Third, you want to coordinate with IT to make sure the survey will be perceived as legitimate and will not be quarantined as spam.

Analysis and Communication

It is important to determine who will have access to the data and how any reports will be shared. This may depend on the type of questions asked, as the more sensitive the questions, the closer you will want to keep the data. It is critically important that you act on data you receive.

Taking action is relatively simple for basic questions such as “Did you know we have a Code of Conduct?”
If the response shows that awareness is low, create a plan to better publicize it. For more sensitive data,
such as questions about fraud or harassment, make sure you are sharing the information with the right
offices first, and then take any prudent actions necessary (in coordination with General Counsel).

CONCLUSION

There are many benefits that internal audit or compliance can obtain from conducting an Ethical Climate Survey, including a better understanding of culture, observing how cultures change, and having an effective compliance and ethics program recognized by government entities. The survey itself will raise awareness for your ethics program and help inform the campus that doing the right thing is important. By thinking through the goals, design, distribution, analysis, and communication, you will ensure that the survey is a valuable contribution to your compliance and ethics program.

About the Authors

Janet Covington

Janet Covington joined Rice University in March 2003 as the Director of Internal Audit. Janet received her Bachelor of Science in Accounting from the University of South Alabama. She is a Certified Internal Auditor, Certified Information Systems...
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Janet Covington

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Sure We Have an Ethics Program, but is it Effective? Conducting Ethical Climate Surveys in Higher Education

Kenneth J Liddle

Kenneth J. Liddle was hired as Rice University’s first Director of Compliance in 2015, and promoted to Chief Compliance Officer in 2017. Prior to joining Rice, Ken was a compliance officer for MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a law clerk on ethics and fraud with the US Air Force, and a financial analyst with the William J. Clinton Foundation. Ken received his law degree from Suffolk University, his MBA from University of Texas at San Antonio, and his B.S. in Business-Accountancy from Trinity University. He is a Certified Compliance and Ethics Professional, Certified Federal Contracts Manager, and a licensed attorney.

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Sure We Have an Ethics Program, but is it Effective? Conducting Ethical Climate Surveys in Higher Education

Scotty Jenkins

Scotty Jenkins is a compliance manager in Emory University’s Office of Compliance. Prior to working in Emory’s central compliance office, Scotty worked at the Emory Institutional Review Board, where he started out with the compliance team during its build phase and then rotated through as a research protocol analyst. Scotty’s received a bachelor's degree in psychology from Georgia Southern University, a graduate certificate in international affairs from Texas A&M University, and a master's degree in bioethics from Emory University. He is also a Certified Compliance and Ethics Professional.

Articles
Sure We Have an Ethics Program, but is it Effective? Conducting Ethical Climate Surveys in Higher Education