Today, CEO’s, General Counsel, Chief Ethics Officers and the like are challenged with maintaining an ethical corporate image, avoiding negative publicity, and helping their employees make the right ethical decisions every day. Protecting your company and its reputation is priceless. Implementing a total ethics and compliance solution that meets and exceeds the 2004 revised U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines and recent Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) requirements is fundamental in helping you to reduce risk and mitigate corporate penalties.
These government agencies now require formal ethics programs for all contractors receiving awards greater than $5 million where the period of performance is 120 days or more.
If this applies to you, as a government contractor, here are the “must haves” for your organization:
• Have a written code of business ethics and conduct.
• Have an employee business ethics and compliance training program.
• Provide a copy of the code to each employee engaged in performance of the contract.
• Have an ongoing business ethics and awareness program.
(Source: Federal Acquisition Regulation; FAR Case 2006-007, Contractor Code of Business Ethics and Conduct; http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2007/pdf/07-5800.pdf)
Meet Federal Training Requirements
RedHawk has a Code of Conduct for Government Contractors training solution that helps you meet these requirements. Starting with our Ethics Communication CoachSM(ECC) awareness program, a truly one-of-a-kind solution that is not available from any other vendor in the industry, your organization will be equipped to respond to the specific business ethics awareness demands of FAR. The members-only website, www.ECCmember.com, provides hundreds of tools for use in advertising an upcoming training session as well as creating a complete communication campaign for use throughout the year, keeping ethics at the forefront of employees’ minds.
ECC members have access to RedHawk’s deep library of easily customizable communication and awareness tools (posters, articles, brochures, mini-training modules in PowerPoint and Flash formats, etc.), fresh installments of communication tools quarterly, and many other benefits. The ECC program allows you to update employees on key ethics issues and saturate your global environment with constant messaging. You can think of the ECC as your own continuing education and marketing awareness campaign for ethics and compliance.
As a compliment to the ECC program, we provide Code of Conduct for Government Contractors rewriting and design consulting services.
RedHawk’s philosophy of what a Code should be is simple: A Code document should, to the extent possible, provide a bridge between a company’s values and its policies on ethics and compliance matters. Often, this will mean that the restating of policies from the company’s policy manual is less important than articulating the principles informing the policies referenced in the Code.
The Code should be a user-friendly tool for employees across the enterprise; it is a first-line resource in resolving ethical questions and helping users navigate new situations for which formal policies have not yet been formulated. A Code should be written in plain language, and should include reader-tools such as callouts, bulleted lists, conceptual graphics, a table of contents, etc. to help readers find precisely what they need quickly. Its presentation should appeal to users of varying learning styles, so that everyone can access the Code successfully.
RedHawk also provides design services for a freshly redrafted Code of Conduct. In our view, the graphic design elements of the Code are integral to the presentation of content in creating a document that employees can learn from, and depend on for ethical guidance.
In addition, RedHawk will provide translations of the Code, with complete layout services to allow the translated text to fit appropriately into the Code design, for each of the languages required by your company.