What happens when trust in standards falls.
Professional standards are effectively a promise.
When an association accredits a practitioner, issues a professional designation or requires members to comply with a code of conduct, it is telling employers, clients, government and the public that the designation means something.
Members rely on that promise too. Part of the value of belonging to a profession is the standing that comes with it: the expectation that members meet an accepted standard and that the organisation will act when they do not.
Most of the time, relatively little attention is paid to the processes behind that promise.
Until something goes wrong.
When trust breaks
Australia's accounting and audit profession is providing a useful case study.
Conduct issues involving some of the country's largest professional services firms have brought greater scrutiny to the systems intended to maintain professional and ethical standards. Most recently, KPMG Australia acknowledged shortcomings in its handling of whistleblower concerns and identified instances in which confidential client information had been inappropriately shared internally. Senior leadership departures, governance changes and external review have followed.
The Government's response is broader than KPMG. Treasury's review of the regulation of accounting, auditing and consulting firms is considering accountability, conflicts of interest, governance, ethical and quality standards, disciplinary arrangements and audit surveillance.
This matters beyond accounting because regulatory failures rarely remain questions about individual conduct for long. Once confidence in a profession is damaged, attention moves to the institutions that were supposed to set the rules, monitor behaviour and enforce the standards.
That includes professional bodies.
The tension in self-regulation
Professional bodies often perform two roles that do not always sit entirely comfortably together. They represent and support the members who fund them. But many also set professional standards, accredit practitioners, investigate complaints and discipline members who fall short.
That does not make self-regulation inherently flawed.
Professional bodies have expertise that government regulators often do not, and there are good reasons the model has endured. But its legitimacy depends on trust that the standards function will operate independently and effectively, including when the interests of individual members conflict with those of the profession or the public.
Treasury has already raised this issue in accounting. Earlier work cited concerns about the perceived conflict where a professional body both represents and disciplines its members while relying significantly on membership fees for income.
The professional bodies disputed the characterisation. The significance for other professions is not that government will necessarily reach the same conclusion elsewhere but that the assumption underpinning self-regulation is being tested.
For boards of professional bodies in other fields, the question is worth considering before somebody else asks it:
Could we demonstrate that our system works?
A process is not evidence
Most professional bodies can demonstrate that a standards framework exists.
There is a code of conduct. There are accreditation requirements. There is a complaints process. There may be an independent disciplinary panel and sanctions.
These are all important, of course. But is it also important to be able to answer the following questions?
· Can members explain the standards expected of them?
· Do they believe those standards are applied consistently?
· Do employers and other stakeholders have confidence in the designation or accreditation?
· Does the public understand what protections the standards provide?
· And whether complaints and disciplinary processes actually identify and address poor conduct?
Complaints data usually exists because it has to. Data on confidence often does not, because nobody has previously needed to ask.
Members are watching too
The risk is not only regulatory. Professional standards are part of the membership proposition too. Our benchmark data shows that trusted standards are one of the top five drivers of membership in professional associations.
Members invest in qualifications, CPD, accreditation and professional designations because they signal something about competence and standing. The harder the designation is to earn and the more consistently its standards are upheld, the more valuable that signal can be.
The reverse is also true.
If members believe poor conduct is tolerated, complaints disappear into a process or standards are applied inconsistently, confidence in the professional body itself can begin to weaken.
At some point the question becomes commercial as well as regulatory: if the designation means less, what is the value of belonging to the body behind it?
That makes member confidence in standards and disciplinary processes something boards should understand alongside satisfaction, engagement, retention and perceptions of membership value.
What evidence could be collected
So what should boards know?
Conduct and complaints data are the obvious starting point: volumes, types of complaints, resolution times and outcomes, tracked over time rather than presented as an annual snapshot.
But boards should also know whether members understand their obligations, believe standards are applied fairly and have confidence in disciplinary processes.
And because professional standards exist partly to give confidence to people outside the profession, the evidence should not stop at the membership. Employers, regulators, clients and the public may all have a view about what a professional designation means.
Comparative evidence matters too. A body should know how its standards, disciplinary settings and outcomes compare with equivalent professions in Australia and overseas.
Together, these measures provide something procedures alone cannot: evidence that the standards function is understood, credible and working as intended.
Measure before you need to prove it
The worst time to establish a baseline for trust is after it has been damaged.
If confidence falls following a controversy, boards need to know by how much. If governance or disciplinary reforms are introduced, they need to know whether confidence recovers.
A measure of trust is included in many of the membership surveys we conduct, because it not easy to establish if nobody measured it before it is needed.
The accounting, audit and consulting sectors are now facing these questions in public. Other professions may never face the same circumstances. But any professional body that asks government, employers, the public and its own members to trust the standards it sets should be able to demonstrate why that trust is justified.
Because when trust in professional standards breaks down, the risk is not simply that government decides to regulate more. It is that the standards and the membership or designation built around them begin to mean less.
If you would like to have a discussion about how you can measure trust in your association, or more specifically in your accreditation and standards program, please reach out to Bec Sullivan at rsullivan@surveymatters.com.au. We are always happy to have an obligation free chat about how this can be done in your association.