adminevaluation involves collecting and analysing information about the project that should help the organisation to know whether it is on track to reach its objectives.
Monitoring the progress of the project allows the organisation to adapt the programme as needed to ensure that it attains its set goals.
Monitoring and evaluation thus helps organisations to determine whether they are doing what they said they were going to do, whether they are achieving what they said they would achieve, and whether the project design is sound.
Through monitoring and evaluation, the organisation is able to develop an ethics programme that responds to its specific needs and circumstances as they change over time.
It allows the organisation to determine how many of the ethics programme outcomes have been achieved.
It also helps to reveal what organisational benefits are accruing to the firm to justify time, effort, and resources that the organisation is putting in the programme, and to check the level of commitment of all staff levels to the success of the ethics programme.
The reason why codes of ethics end up gathering dust in offices without being of any value to organisations is because nobody bothers to follow up on them to see whether what was agreed in the code is being practised by staff.
To ensure that the whole evaluation process is credible in terms of objectivity particularly in the eyes of employees, a scientific approach to the evaluation process needs to be developed and adopted.
Data collection methods such as interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, etc, can be used to collect data for that purpose.
The board must endorse the whole process because these are the people who provide the ethical tone, guidance, and they are the people who afford all round leadership that must ensure the success of the evaluation process.
Ethics programme monitoring and evaluation must be inspired by the need to ensure the success of the ethics endeavour in creating an ethical culture that moulds positive employee behaviour that impacts the bottom line.
Better still, management best practices decree that it is improper for organisations to dedicate significant management attention and company resources to a programme without evaluating its performance to determine whether it is a worthwhile effort.
The responsibility of evaluating ethics should therefore be hinges on three key aspects, namely evaluation of the programme implementation process, evaluation of the programme outcomes, and evaluation of monitoring and evaluation tools.
Process monitoring and evaluation is an effort that looks at how the ethics programme is working.
It looks at whether resources are being used efficiently, and whether assigned activities are being performed.
This can take the format of known and common organisational process evaluation models like the renowned International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) management systems for quality articulation.
The ISO standards do not define quality but examine whether processes that lead to quality goods and services have been followed and this is exactly what an ethics monitoring and evaluation tool should achieve.
Process evaluation must also look at ethics training expenses, number of employees trained per year and their levels, participant satisfaction with the training, challenges faced, successes, etc.
Monitoring and evaluating the programme process means answering questions like; have we established ethics standards guidelines?
Are all employees attending ethics training? Is the ethics infrastructure put in place comprehensive enough to ensure the success of the ethics programme?
Is training being conducted according to set standards? Such questions will provide management with insight into the effectiveness of the ethics processes, and where adjustments are required they should be executed promptly.
Evaluating programme outcomes means providing answers to questions such as: Is the organisation experiencing less misconduct as a result of the ethics programme?
Are employees able to recognise and resolve ethical issues with ease? Are employees feeling encouraged to seek advice on ethical matters?
Assessing the monitoring and evaluation tools is motivated by the need to find out how well the evaluation process was planned and executed.
The organisation should find out whether it secured the intended information, how well the information secured was utilised, and what the impact of the evaluation was on staff and management.
As part of its disclosure obligations, the organisation should be able to report on the performance of the ethics programme at AGMs as this will help to build
stakeholder confidence both internally and externally.
For publicly listed companies, such reporting could be made as part of the half-yearly and yearly-financial reporting.
It is heartening to note that from September 24 to October 12 senior civil servants from Ghana, Sierra Leone and Liberia have been undergoing an intensive Ethical Leadership Training in Accra.
This seeks to empower them as change agents and catalysts for quality and productivity improvement and ethical leadership in the public sector right across the West African sub-region under the banner, “Ethical Leadership for Quality and Productivity Improvement (ELQP) in Africa”.
- Bradwell Mhonderwa is an Ethics Coach and Trainer with the Business Ethics Centre. Send feedback to [email protected],or visit www.businessethicscentre.co.zw, or call 0772 913 875.
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