If you have ethical issues that are significant enough to put your company’s reputation at risk, then you need to be reporting on how they are being managed and what sort of results are being achieved. This means embedding ethics reporting within your management information systems and compliance schedule of internal controls.
You may not always have a metric that’s an exact mirror of the ethical risk or opportunity, but there will always be a representative metric that tells you whether your company is going forwards, backwards or sideways on ethics. Having both set up non-financial MI from scratch, as well as helped revitalise existing arrangements, I can bring an experienced ‘critical friend’ perspective to keeping your Board informed about the ethical issues that matter.
Good reporting looks both to the future and to the past. That means having an ethics radar that can track current issues and spot emerging trends. Not easy from within a single company, but straightforward for an ‘ethics watcher’ like myself long versed in how the sector works. As a regular writer of board report material, I understand the audience and have the experience to create a professional report.
Duncan is an independent adviser on business ethics, with a particular focus on the insurance and financial planning sectors. He worked in insurance for 18 years and has been an ethics adviser for 11 years. He's a Chartered Insurance Practitioner.