• How does your organization promote and ensure ethical behavior in all interactions?
• What are your key processes and measures or indicators for enabling and monitoring ethical behavior?
• How do you monitor and respond to breaches of ethical behavior?
• What are your results for key measures or indicators of breaches of ethical behavior?

Most organizations try to instill ethical behavior with some type of compliance training. As Dan and Chip Heath point out in “How to Make Corporate Training Rock,” that training tends to be so dull that nobody would take it if it wasn’t mandatory.

For BearingPoint, a management and technology firm, compliance training was too critical to make it boring, so they told their chief compliance officer to redesign their program to influence the behavior of employees operating in different organizational cultures across the country. Russ Berland, the compliance officer, and his team interviewed employees about the “gray areas” they encountered. The stories they heard became the basis for a fictional video series of ten short episodes. You can watch an episode at the story link above.

Modeled after The Office, the series features a Kevin, a “lovably, oily boss,” and Vanessa, “a levelheaded analyst on Kevin’s team.” Here’s an exchange between the two when Kevin proposes throwing a surprise party for a client, Ricardo, to curry favor.

VANESSA: Sir, how are we going to pay for this?

KEVIN: We’ll just work it into the bill somewhere.

VANESSA: We can’t bill a client for a birthday party.

KEVIN: [Exasperated] Okay, you know what? Fine. I tried. You know what, Vanessa? I want you to look Ricardo in the face and tell him that we don’t care enough to throw a party for him.

VANESSA: Wasn’t this party supposed to be a surprise? Why do I have to tell Ricardo that the party is off if he never even knew about it in the first place?

KEVIN: Well, now it’s “Surprise! There’s no party!” Tell him that.

The videos were so successful at BearingPoint that employees were madly searching for them on the company’s staging server on the weekends before the next weekly episodes debuted. Better yet, people started calling the company’s ethics hotline to discuss issues. “The episodes gave people permission to talk about tough topics,” write the Heaths.

If we really take these “uncomfortable” issues seriously, “we need to show a little bravery,” the Heaths conclude. “Our three-ring binders won’t change a thing. But a little humor and humanity might.”

To read more about ethics, click on these articles:

• Backdoor Access to World-Class Performance
• The Most and Least Ethical Companies
• How to Build a Culture of Social Responsibility

• Financial
• Customer
• Workforce

Better yet, read Category 7 in the award application summary of any winner you choose (click here) and you will find impressive results across all six of the areas measured.

The Results Category is the only Category in the Baldrige Criteria that examines your organization’s performance and improvement—but this one Category is worth 45% of the possible points when scoring a Baldrige application because the Baldrige model focuses on results. The best way to evaluate your results is through an assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve your results, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:

What are your current levels and trends in key measures of:

1. Product performance OR student learning and improvement in student learning OR health care outcomes, health care process results, patient safety, and patients’ functional status?
2. Customer/student/patient and stakeholder satisfaction, dissatisfaction, relationship building, and engagement?
3. Financial performance?
4. Market or marketplace performance?
5. Workforce engagement and satisfaction?
6. Workforce and leader development?
7. The operational performance of your work systems and key work processes?
8. Regulatory and legal compliance and ethical behavior?
9. For each of these measures, how does your organization’s performance compare to that of your competitors and other organizations with similar products, services, or programs?
10. How do these results address your organization’s important customer; product, service, program, and/or offering; market; process; and action plan performance requirements?

High-performing organizations have results in all of these areas that show current levels and trends. They have benchmarks for most of their results and they typically exceed the benchmarks in those areas important to their success. And their results demonstrate performance on the key processes described in the first six Categories of their application.

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When asked what specific concerns faced their hospitals in the area of patient safety and quality, redesigning care processes and redesigning the work environment to reduce errors both received 66%, compliance with accrediting organizations got 60%, and medication errors was identified by 57% of respondents.

These strategic challenges help explain why healthcare organizations now account for roughly half of all Baldrige applications despite being one of six categories: Financial challenges, which are exacerbated by caring for the uninsured, are forcing hospitals to be as efficient as possible while still providing safe, high-quality patient care. The Baldrige model helps hospitals address all of these challenges by understanding how their management systems work, where their greatest opportunities for improvement are, and how they can make dramatic improvements quickly.

The nine hospitals and medical centers that have received the Baldrige Award demonstrate how to tackle all of these challenges at the same time. To find out how they did it, read their award application summaries, which are available through the Baldrige program.

You can read a summary of the ACHE survey here.

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