“An authentic corporate culture based on values that are lived out within the company is key for business success.” Keen readers of the INSIDE NKG MAG (formerly known as NKG Connected, that’s why we use it here) could go back into the archives and find this sentence in the NKG Connected No. 31, a Special Issue on the launch of our NKG Integrity Initiative. This was back in 2017, and a lot has happened since then. For example, newer colleagues might wonder: What’s the Integrity Initiative? Don’t worry, you didn’t miss an important memo – the Integrity Initiative is actually a bit of a “legacy program” at this point, which has served its purpose very well and is no longer needed after achieving the goal of formalizing and anchoring NKG’s values and commitment to integrity. As a part of it, we released the first NKG Code of Conduct and Compliance Guidelines, and opened our Integrity Reporting channels in 2017.

In the next NKG Connected issue in 2018, we introduced our very first Integrity Champion – both to honor a great colleague, and to keep open the conversation around our still new Code of Conduct and its core messages. Five years later, it is hard to imagine our group without the (since updated) NKG Code of Conduct at the core, but we have chosen to keep the Integrity Champion nomination going, to showcase how our values are upheld and lived by our colleagues around the globe.