Ensuring an Ethical Business Establishing ethics standards makes sense for your bottom line.

For Tina Byles Williams, hiring ethical employees is doing the smart thing as much as doing the right thing. The pension funds and other institutions that pay her 10-year-old firm, FIS Group Inc., for investment advice and management naturally expect that none of her 16 employees will make off with their funds. They also expect no conflicts of interest or other improprieties--a matter brought into high relief three years ago when a former employee's activities made Williams consider measures to prevent unethical employee behavior.

Since the incident, the $6 million company has re-examined its process for hiring, evaluating and retaining ethical employees. Williams, 45, now regards hiring ethical employees to be a core mission: "If part of what we're selling is trust, it's critical to hire people of integrity and high ethics."

Those people may be hard to find, according to the 2005 "National Business Ethics Survey." The report by the Ethics Resource Center found that 52 percent of employees had observed at least one type of misconduct in the workplace during the past year--but only 55 percent of them reported it. Also, according to the nonprofit Washington, DC, research and education organization, the number of employees reporting misconduct fell by 10 percent from the prior survey in 2003.