Appendix 3: Guidelines for the Ethics Audit

Introduction

Social responsibility audits have been around for some years . And since they are closely related to image, reputation and relationships between organizations and their publics, they have been of great interest to public relations practitioners . In general, social responsibility has been described as having three levels.

1. The first level involves minimal legal compliance .

2. The second level is what has been termined enlightened self-interest . This is often where PR comes in. The organization's good works are used as a strategic tool to position the organization in the marketplace as being superior to its competitors .

3. The highest level is representative of a kind of higher level of ethical thinking: the organization does good works because of a belief in a responsibility to contribute to the community regardless of payback to the organization's bottom line.

Ethics audits, while covering some of the same ground, are a bit different. Ethics audits also include an evaluation of the organization's specific ethics progamme, including their code of behaviour and the extent to which employees abide by it.

Just as there are three levels of social responsibility ”and audits to cover each ”there are several different levels of ethics auditing. According to Frank Navran ^[*] writing online for the Ethics Resource Center, there are three kinds of ethics audits.

1. Compliance audits reflect a kind of basic level of ethical functioning that is congruent with the first level of social responsibility. An auditor would examine the extent to which the organization's ethics programme, both its policies and the way these policies are implemented, complies with all required laws and industry policies and norms.

2. A step up, the cultural audit is one that is actually quite familiar to use in public relations. It's really an examination of the organization's corporate culture in that it assesses how employees feel about the ethical standards of the organization in which they work, concluding with a cultural diagnosis.

3. The most comprehensive of all the audits is the systems audit, which includes both compliance and culture, and then takes a comprehensive look at the integration of ethics into the way the entire organization functions.

^[*] Navran, F, Ethics Audits: You Get What You Pay For. Ethics Resource Center web site. [accessed 27 April 2004] http://www.ethics.org/resources/article_detail.cfm?ID=19