The Global Ethics Office and Ferring’s ethics program

Within Ferring Pharmaceuticals, the management idea of business ethics has materialized into the Global Ethics Office. The Office was established in 2005 as a corporate function operating from Denmark, and the office and all its activities was developed by a Danish manager. Back then, Ferring was a much smaller company and did not have a formal corporate headquarters, nor did the office in Switzerland exist. Being the largest entity within the company, I have been told, the Danish office served as an informal headquarters at that time. This is the reason why the Global Ethics Office was originally based in Denmark and continues to have ethics officers in this location, despite the global headquarters now being in Switzerland.

Ferring’s code of ethics, the Ferring Philosophy, lies at the core of the Global Ethics Office’s activities and, as will be elaborated later, was developed by the owner of the company and a trusted advisor based on consultations with managers and employees worldwide. In 2016, a new head of the office was appointed and based at headquarters in Switzerland, and since then, the Global Ethics Office has been led from here but with employees also located in Denmark, USA and Israel.

Ferring Pharmaceuticals’ report on corporate social responsibility for 2015-2016 states that

‘The core responsibility for Business Ethics lies with the Global Ethics Office’⁵⁵, and the role purpose statement for one of the job categories within the Global Ethics Office is ‘Creating awareness about preferred business behaviour’ and ‘having a strong informal influence on business behaviour and conduct within the company’. Organizationally, the office carries out the directions given by an ‘Ethics and Compliance Board Committee’ which is under the company’s Board of Directors, to which the head of the Global Ethics Office reports. The Global Ethics Office is part of the Compliance, Ethics and Legal Team; a corporate unit consisting of 65 people, headed by the Group General Counsel.

The Global Ethics Office consists of five full-time employees, a part-time consultant and a head of office, all of which will be referred to as ‘ethics officers’. As anthropologist Steven Sampson points out, ‘ethics officers’ are not necessarily legal counsels with the aim to mitigate risk but rather employees in a normative corporate function put in place to distinguish right from wrong and encourage employees to do what is considered ‘the right thing’ within the company (Sampson 2016:70). The Global Ethics Office

55 http://www.ferringresponsibility.com/pillars/business-ethics accessed 15th of August 2017

110 maintains a network of approximately 55 ‘ethics coordinators’ who ‘act as local ethics ambassadors’⁵⁶ and whose managers have agreed to allocate up to 5% of their time to ethics-related tasks.

Kaptein (2009) has defined nine components that ethics programs may contain (see also Kaptein 2015), and Ferring has the majority of these components in place. The foundation of an ethics program, Kaptein writes, is a code of ethics, which in Ferring is the Ferring Philosophy. The second component is to have ethics officers and perhaps even an ethics office, which Ferring likewise has.

The Global Ethics Office carries out their work through a number of activities. First of all, they facilitate the ‘Ferring Philosophy Workshop’, a mandatory training for to which all level staff and managers in their local business units are invited. According to Kaptein, the third component of an ethics program is to conduct periodic ethics training for employees (Kaptein 2009:264). The Global Ethics Office ensures that local ethics coordinators in the many business units worldwide are equipped to carry out these workshops. They do so by training local trainers and by providing playbooks, training materials, e-learning programs and a comprehensive facilitator kit on the intranet with various sorts of awareness raising material. Moreover, in 2018 the Global Ethics Office tested and introduced an ethics workshop for managers named ‘Leading with Integrity’. However, this manager workshop was never rolled out due to the introduction of a new leadership framework by Global HR that I will describe later in this chapter.

The Global Ethics Office is also responsible for the online learning materials found on the intranet, which new staff and managers are likewise urged to complete. Moreover, ethics officers lead various communication and awareness campaigns, organize activities and publish newsletters. Another major task is maintaining the corporate whistle-blowing scheme, the ‘Ferring Alertline’, where staff and managers can report any wrongdoing they see committed in Ferring or in Ferring’s name.

Within Kaptein’s (Kaptein 2009:264) framework for ethics programs, the fourth component is likewise to have a hotline or another type of whistle-blowing scheme to report unethical conduct. Kaptein’s framework also contains a number of more disciplinary components, such as policies for managers’ and employees’ accountability for unethical behaviour, policies for how allegations submitted through the hotline are investigated as well as policies for rewards and incentives for ethical conduct (Kaptein 2009:264–65). The Global Ethics Office is responsible for the ‘Business Ethics and Conflicts of Interest Policy’ which focuses on elements such as fraud and bribery, and a clear process for how to investigate allegations is also in place. However, there are no policies for rewards and incentives for ethical conduct. The last two components of Kaptein’s framework are to have systems to assess ethical

56 http://www.ferringresponsibility.com/pillars/business-ethics accessed 15th of August 2017

111 performance in the organization and to have ethical pre-employment screenings of prospective

employees. In line with this component, the Global Ethics Office maintains the biannual ‘Risk Clarity Survey’ to measure observed misconduct and knowledge of the ethics program across the organization, but to my knowledge, although numerous pre-employment screenings exist, no particular ethics-focused screening takes place in Ferring. Lastly, the office is responsible for tasks related to data privacy, an area of work that was added during the course of this research. ⁵⁷ The components of Ferring’s ethics program are summarized in Table 4 below.

Table 4 - Comparison of Kaptein’s ideal definition of ethics program components with Ferring’s ethics program

Kaptein’s definition of ethics program components Ferring’s ethics program

A code of ethics The Ferring Philosophy

Ethics officers or an ethics office The Global Ethics Office

Formal ethics training The Ferring Philosophy workshop and online courses (and the manager training ‘Leading with Integrity’, which was discontinued before it was rolled out globally)

A non-retaliatory hotline to report misconduct anonymously

The Ferring Alertline. Non-retaliatory and ensures anonymity if the caller wishes it so

Policies on managerial and employee accountability for unethical behaviour

The business ethics and conflicts of interest policy

Policies on investigations of allegations. A process for how to investigate allegations exists.

Policies for rewards and incentives for ethical conduct

No policy for rewards and incentives of ethical conduct exists

Internal systems to monitor or assess ethical performance and the effectiveness of their ethics programs

The biannual Risk Clarity Survey measures employees’

knowledge of ethics program components as wel l as observations of misconduct

Pre-employment screenings of whether new employees’ ethical orientations correspond to the standards of the company

No such screenings exist in Ferring

57 The composition and tasks of the Global Ethics Office has changed during the course of this research, and this description thus corresponds to the composition at the time of the fieldwork in 2017-2018. Please see Chapter 8 for an outline of the changes in the Global Ethics Office.

112 As outlined in Chapter 2, scholars often distinguish between compliance-oriented ethics practices that focus on detection and punishment, and values-oriented ethics practices that focus on fostering an environment supportive of ethical reflections (cf. Paine 1994; Weaver and Treviño 1999). As I will highlight in the following, Ferring’s approach is highly values-oriented.