Do the right thing

Everyone's familiar with return-on-investment, but when it comes to return-on-culture, many of us are left scratching our heads. Salopek investigates the bottom line of ethics and morality training and talks to the experts about an effective ethics program's return-on-culture. As you might expect, when managers and employees do the right thing, the return is more than monetary. Driven by moral or legal obligations, reputation management, change, or just the idea that good ethics is good business, more companies are creating ethics programs to create a higher level of trust, open communication, and empowered decision making. But getting employees to stay the same ethical course set by an organization takes a good deal of tact from trainers. Ethics training has been called the softest of the soft skills. When it sets, it allows organizations to raise awareness that corporate values are important-strategically and culturally establish visibility of corporate values and ethics give employees the tools to make ethical decisions teach employees to consider the consequences of their actions. Of course, no training program will succeed without the involvement and modeling of managers and executives. Asked the importance of their involvement, a consultant replies, "I don't have an adjective big enough."