Tag: Corp culture

Categories
31 Days to More Effective Compliance Programs

One Month to a More Effective Compliance Program Through Culture: Day 8-A Listening Tour to Improve Culture

Any top CEO must first listen. But it is more than simply listening to rebuild trust, it is rebuilding employee engagement by making them and their ideas part of the solution. Today, we consider how a compliance listening tour can improve culture.

A.    Engagement

Start off by meeting as many compliance stakeholders as possible. You can use town hall settings or go smaller, meeting with key employee leaders, key stakeholders, and employees identified as high-risk who you can meet with individually or in smaller groups. Listen to their compliance concerns and take their compliance ideas back to the home office. After returning to your office, winnow down their ideas and suggestions to form the basis of enhancements to your culture. This employee engagement will lead to greater stakeholder buy-in for your culture.

B.    Education

But during the town hall meetings, and the smaller more informal group meetings, you can do more than listen, you can also train. This training is on ethics and how the employees could use compliance as a business tool. Moreover, this lays the groundwork for enhancing your culture and the training that will occur as the enhancement is rolled out.

C.    Risk Assessment

Now, think about this same approach from the risk assessment perspective. Listen to your employee’s concerns and listen to the compliance issues raised. From there you can begin to ask questions about what was done and why. This approach is not adversarial or an interrogation. Still, it is ferreting out the employee’s concerns while having the employees educate your compliance team on the actual procedures that are used. By listening, and gently questioning, you should be able to garner enough information to create a risk assessment profile that can inform and even become the basis of compliance program enhancements.

Three key takeaways:

1. A listening tour can be used to improve your culture.

2. Listening improves engagement, which improves culture.

3. Culture lessens if employees think you don’t care.

Do you want to improve your culture? How can you assess your culture and develop a strategy to improve it going forward? In this free webinar on the new tool, The Culture Audit with Tom Fox and Sam Silverstein on Tuesday, November 28, 12 CT. For more information and registration, click here.

Categories
The Affiliated Monitors Expert Podcast

What factors influence the ethical culture of a company?


In this podcast, I visit with Vin DiCianni, founder of Affiliated Monitors, Inc. In it, we explore corporation culture and its relationship to ethics and compliance. We began with senior leadership. A company does not have an ethical culture unless the top management commits to it going forward. Employees not only listen to what they say but they watch how they act. Employees look for signals about what really counts in an organization. But you must then move down to implementation of this goal. Employees want to know if senior leadership is committed to the company’s core values. But equally important is a sense of organizational justice and fairness. Employees want to not only see they will be treated fairly but there is not a delineation of favorites and non-favorites in an organization. DiCianni emphasized that it is the senior leadership who really drives the alignment between incentives and performance.
The key is that there be an alignment between what top management says, coupled with the company’s core values and what the organization says together with what they do. This all comes from senior management getting out of their office and talking to employees in the field to see not only what they think but how they feel. No company aspires to be unethical and most assuredly employees do not want to engage in unethical behavior but if senior management does not talk to employees they will not know how their messages are being received. It does not take long when there is a disconnect between what senior management says and what the employees take away. It is a bit disconcerting how little top management really understand their employees. Because of this, senior leaders do not know what messages they are receiving, both verbal and non-verbal.