Maintaining an Ethical Workplace: Third-party employee hotline, case management solution helps CDW keep watch

It was an infraction, an apparently isolated breach of corporate policy that could have gone entirely unnoticed. A manager bought a hot new product before its official release date with his employee discount and then sold the product on eBay for a profit.

If it had remained unnoticed and undocumented, the company might have missed the fact that many others were engaging in similar non-ethical behaviors, putting the company’s relationship with its vendors at significant risk and costing them selling opportunities with customers.

Management at Vernon Hills, Ill.-based CDW, a provider of business-to-business technology products and services, wanted to ensure that, as much as possible, incidents like this would not go unnoticed in its operation.

To accomplish this, CDW’s management focused on two related goals. First, to give its co-workers a safe outlet to report suspected violations and seek guidance on ethical and compliance issues. Second, to develop a robust incident management process which would allow it to aggregate data about policy violations so that it could identify issues and trends early.