FRA sponsors the fourth edition of the Nordic Business Ethics Survey

The expansion of the survey’s coverage is testament to the value it offers in filling a gap between perception and reality in this region. This year, the survey included respondents in Estonia, reaching a total of 5.000 respondents from Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Estonia. FRA is proud to support the team of experts behind the Survey in their mission to help businesses be proactive in raising the bar for ethical leadership and organizational culture.

The survey was structured in three sections: foundations for an ethical working environment, observations of unethical behavior at work, and ethical standards of an organization. This year’s results revealed some positive change in terms of interventions into misconduct, but also stark increase in observed unethical behaviour:

“Whether it is the impact of the EU Whistleblowing directive or something else we see a dramatic increase in interventions into misconduct, which we seem to tolerate less. And that is a good thing. The question, however, is whether organisations are capable of dealing with these concerns in a professional way. This year we included a question on retaliation and see that senior management most frequently report being retaliated against when raising a concern. Every second senior manager reports being retaliated against (54.5%). Even if we are much more inclined to intervene, we have also witnessed more frequent misconduct than reported in 2020. One interesting observation is that men report observing more sexual harassment than their female counterparts (32% vs. 45%), we also see more observations of bribery and corruption than reported in 2020. This does not necessarily mean that our workplaces have become less ethical, it may also mean that we are more sensitised to identifying unethical behaviour.” (Page 3)

Download the full report here:https://www.nordicbusinessethics.com/nbes2022/

FRA director Viktor Josefsson joined Nordic Business Ethics Network (NBEN) founders Niina Ratsula and Anna Romberg for the launch event in Stockholm, where he focused on what this year’s results reveal about unethical behaviour at work in the Nordic countries. He noted the startling results of 53% of respondents observing unlawful behavior compared to 8% in a similar question in 2020. He said that the positive take on this could be that employees were now better equipped to identify such behavior, but taking into account results elsewhere in the survey on respondents feeling pressured to compromise their ethical standards, the reality was more likely that the pressure of the recent global economic situation was creating a perfect storm for fraud. Watch the full recorded session here:

About the Nordic Business Ethics Network
The Nordic Business Ethics platform was created out of the founders’ joint passion towards building stronger and more responsible organisations. Their ambition is to promote responsible business conduct, support business leaders and professionals through sharing lessons learned, build best practices and facilitate dialogue and networking. https://www.nordicbusinessethics.com/