Whenever I talk to a prospect about ethics training, I get the same old song. “It’s just not something we can justify spending our training budget on. It’s too soft, there’s no direct link to ROI.” Yet they’ll spend money on teaching their employees how to write, how to pitch and what Twitter is. Bad move. Not enforcing ethics at agencies and in-house departments has serious financial consequences. Just ask the LA office of Fleishman Hillard.
Better yet, check out a more recent headline that popped this week: Company Settles Case of Reviews It Faked. The story focused on cosmetic surgery purveyor Lifestyle Lift and a court settlement related to faking reviews of its product on the web.
The company had ordered employees to pretend they were satisfied customers and write glowing reviews of its face-lift procedure on Web sites, according to the attorney general’s statement. Lifestyle Lift also created its own sites of face-lift reviews to appear as independent sources.
One e-mail message, discovered by the attorney general’s office, told employees to “devote the day to doing more postings on the Web as a satisfied client.”
The wind up? $300,000 in penalties paid to the State of NY. Now, had they done some PR ethics training, they would have (a) known not to do this in the first place, and (b) given a judge the option to mitigate the fines because they had an ethics training program in place.
So, the next time you think there is no ROI on ethics training, think again.
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