Successful ethics training. (Training).

THIS ESSAY GERMINATED FROM A truly macabre bit of humor and social commentary: The justly popular Internet auction site eBay[R] recently had a flurry of activity with people eagerly buying souvenir items from an ethics training course offered by and for employees of Houston-based Enron Corporation.

Practically all companies have a policy statement regarding ethical business practices and prohibiting insider trading or conflict of interest. Frequently, employees sign it during their orientation. This is not ethics training, it is just part of the legal fabric we work in.

An ethics course is much more extensive and involved. It generally begins with a strong, but not clearly defined, feeling of dissatisfaction in the gut of the president. The composite impression that he (we'll make it a male this time) has from the personnel issues he is called upon to referee, the customer complaints that reach him and the invisible resistance that all his initiatives seem to meet, is that the employees just don't seem to get it.

An intelligent and analytical man, he jots down what they don't get. His list looks something like this:

* Above all, where is the work ethic that everybody had when the company was younger and tougher?

* What happened to the obsessive customer service that we used to do, and now just talk about?

* We need personal accountability. Why do customer calls get transferred eight times and then abandoned?

* We need character. It starts with honesty, but it's more than that--it's an uncompromising ethical compass in your soul so that you can no more do the wrong thing than you can make a compass point east.

Honest as well as analytical, our president says to himself, "And how have I communicated these requirements? Well ... I haven't."

Fast-forward through a year of meetings and training consultants, and you have an ethics training course with a catchy title, slick handouts and a message of real honesty and importance.

Most companies have a course like this, and more often than not it is a qualified failure. By failure, I mean that the considerable energy and expense of delivering the course is not balanced by a corresponding amount of change in employee mind-set and behavior. By qualified, I mean that, yes, of course some employees do "get it" and modify their behavior as a result of the course.

Why do we usually have a qualified failure in these good-sounding and expensive courses? Because they fail to meet at least one of three necessary characteristics (in addition to intelligent design and meaningful content) for a successful ethics course. Besides intelligent design and meaningful content, an ethics training course needs these three things to be successful. If any one of them is missing, the course will be, at best, a qualified failure.

The first criterion is that the content of the course must be true. By this, I mean that there must be no observable disconnect between the values stated in the course and the visible behavior of the top management team. Employees are extremely sensitive to this--perhaps even to a degree that is unfair.

But unfair or not, if the course says, "We value hard work" and everybody knows that the head of production arrives at the office at 9:50 each day, then the entire course loses much of its credibility. Note that it doesn't matter what time she goes home or whether she works at home until midnight--the fact that she comes in late jeopardizes the course.

The following are other examples that might strike a nerve with some companies in our industry:

* It's better not to say, "We provide the best products at the most competitive prices" if your loan officers are allowed to take 3-point overages.

* It's better not to say, "We recognize and reward performance" if half of your employees are past due for their performance appraisal and salary review.

* It's better not to say, "We are loyal to our employees" if you lay them off by the hundreds at every cyclical downturn in volume.

The second criterion for success is that the course must endure. The reaction of a great many employees to ethics training is, "We'll see." And perhaps this is fair, given the large proportion of ethics courses that do not last very long.

The following example is true in all important particulars, although I have manipulated names and dates somewhat to protect the guilty.

January 1999: The president of the mortgage company's parent division at a huge bank decides to introduce an ethics course. Three (I) consulting companies are brought in.

May 1999: A one-day course called "Living the Philosophy" is completed. It includes an extensive employee survey. A department of two people is formed, charged with ongoing delivery of the course, creation of a newsletter and similar activities.

May to August 1999: The course is rolled out to thousands of employees.

September 1999: Survey feedback to the employees is due, but it is not received. The president leaves the company.

November 1999: The division is reorganized, the department is closed and the two employees are laid off.

Elapsed time: 11 months.

An ethics course gains a great deal of credibility when it has a birthday, and more when it has a second birthday. By its third birthday, it is fair to say the course is embedded in the culture.

The third criterion is the easy one. Many ethics courses are introduced without a plan for getting future new hires through the course, or a plan for updating the course content on a regular basis. There should be a documented process for reviewing the course content at least once a year. And there should be a process (coordinated with the human resources department) by which the names and locations of new employees are fed to the people conducting the ethics course so they can schedule "maintenance-level" delivery of the course, and all employees are trained within a reasonable period of time after being hired.

Andrew Hubbard is national training director for Irwin Mortgage Corporation in Indianapolis.