The world's most ethical companies of 2019 are still working to make employee policies and codes of conduct more comprehensive and digestible, according to a report from Ethisphere published Wednesday.

The report is based on a survey of the 128 companies Ethisphere deemed the most ethical of 2019. Those companies include Dell, Intel Corp., Accenture, Hasbro Inc. and IBM.

Erica Salmon Byrne, executive vice president of Ethisphere, said that authoring policies employees can understand will often begin in the legal department.

“For a lot of companies who are not in highly regulated spaces, the ethics and compliance roles often end up in the legal department,” Byrne said. “One of the things we talked about is that there is a growing focus on company policies.”

Byrne said in the past companies have largely created the documents to have a basis to fire someone rather than train and lead employees toward ethical behavior. She said now policies and company guidelines are being made with the collaboration between ethics and legal teams.

“I've referred to a lot of policies as documents that only lawyers can love,” Byrne said. “One of the things that I've always challenged, for example, is that if you open up your antitrust policy and it refers to the Sherman Act, you need to rewrite your policy. The average sales manager isn't going to know what that is.”

Byrne said she has seen an effort of companies making their policies easier to read and that this year companies are putting in rollover definitions, FAQs and guidance documents so that employees have a better understanding of those policies.

Where companies still struggle, according to the report, is by putting learning aids and examples into codes of conduct. On a scale of one to five, companies averaged a score of 1.7 for learning aids and examples in their policies and codes of conduct.

David Huntley, senior executive vice president and chief compliance officer at AT&T, which was not honored this year, said in an email there may be a better way to teach employees rather than having them read a policy.

“At AT&T, we regularly share a report with employees that highlights cases of employees making poor ethical decisions,” Huntley said. “These cases serve as a reminder to our employees of the importance of just doing the right thing.”

This also appears to be a trend in the report which found that nearly 50 percent of the honorees provide employees with information about the number, types and outcomes of investigations. Eighty-four percent of honorees said they have a tracking tool or case management system that tracks reports and related investigations of how the report was originally made.

“We find these regular updates to be more effective than putting static examples in the code,” Huntley said.

A rising trend Byrne said Ethisphere has seen over the past three years is that boards of directors are beginning to travel to different locations for board meetings to better understand the business.

“Directors are looking to have a much better understanding of the business, so they are looking for these opportunities,” Byrne explained.

According to the report, 72 percent of those surveyed go to a different location at least once a year to have their board meeting. Byrne said this is important because directors get to see what is going on outside of the company's headquarters. Seventy-one percent of companies said they encourage non-director employees to visit a location other than the company's headquarters.

Huntley said directors should travel to these meetings on a case-by-case basis.

“That said, for certain types of businesses there would be advantages to meeting where the company actually conducts its business,” he said. “Doing so allows board members to dig in and really get to know the business they are entrusted to oversee.”