Tag: corporate culture

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Everything Compliance

Episode 109, The New Year’s Edition

Welcome to the only roundtable podcast in compliance as we celebrate our second century of shows. Everything Compliance has been honored by W3 as the top talk show in podcasting. In this episode, we have the quintet of Jay Rosen, Jonathan Armstrong, Jonathan Marks, Tom Fox, and Matt Kelly, all discussing issues they are looking at as we begin 2023. We conclude with our fan-fav Shout Outs and Rants section.

  1. Matt Kelly looks at some of the ESG issues he will be following in 2023, including SEC rules around ESG, potential audit requirements, who will hold this function internally, and the new role of the ESG Controller. He rants about Zulily and its SOX compliance failures which allowed an employee to embezzle over $300,000.

2. Jonathan Marks looks at corporate governance issues in 2023, including board structure and guidance, recent Board failures, and Board oversight and monitoring. He shouts out to the NFL to cancelling the game between the Bengals and Bills.

3. Tom Fox shouts out to the 50th anniversary of School House Rock and lists his top five.

4. Jonathan Armstrong gives us a preview of 5 key issues he is following for 2023: ESG, GDPR fines, ransomware, supply chain risk issues, and crypto scams. He rants about the mistreatment of Prince Harry’s dog and asks if the dog was traumatized when Prince William knocked his brother (Prince Harry) down and broke the dog’s food bowl.

5. Jay Rosen reviews acronyms that drive him crazy. He shouts out to EMS personnel in Cincinnati for training and being prepared when Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest during the Bills game and saved his life.

The members of Everything Compliance are:

•       Jay Rosen– Jay is Vice President, Business Development Corporate Monitoring at Affiliated Monitors. Rosen can be reached at JRosen@affiliatedmonitors.com

•       Karen Woody – One of the top academic experts on the SEC. Woody can be reached at kwoody@wlu.edu

•       Matt Kelly – Founder and CEO of Radical Compliance. Kelly can be reached at mkelly@radicalcompliance.com

•       Jonathan Armstrong –is our UK colleague, who is an experienced data privacy/data protection lawyer with Cordery in London. Armstrong can be reached at jonathan.armstrong@corderycompliance.com

•       Jonathan Marks is Partner, Firm Practice Leader – Global Forensic, Compliance & Integrity Services at Baker Tilly. Marks can be reached at jonathan.marks@bakertilly.com

The host and producer, ranter (and sometime panelist) of Everything Compliance is Tom Fox, the Voice of Compliance. He can be reached at tfox@tfoxlaw.com. Everything Compliance is a part of the Compliance Podcast Network.

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Blog

Assessing and Aligning Your Corporate Values

One of concepts enshrined in the Monaco Memo is that the Department of Justice (DOJ) will assess corporate culture for any company that may find itself under investigation for Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) violations. This enshrinement is not exactly new as Deputy Attorney General (DAG) Lisa Monaco announced this new DOJ focus in October 2021 in her speech to the ABA White Collar Bar Conference. The parameters of how the DOJ will assess culture are still being worked out but Chief Compliance Officers (CCOs) and compliance professionals need to be considering this issue in the context of their own compliance programs and corporate culture in case the DOJ ever comes knocking. Over the next several blog posts, I will be exploring how a corporate compliance function can assess, monitor and improve your corporate culture.

We begin with assessing your corporate values and then aligning them within your organization. In a recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article, entitled What Does Your Company Really Stand For?, authors Paul Ingram and Yoonjin Choi explored these and other issues. I have adapted their work for the compliance professional. The authors believe that corporate values are more critical then ever.

New technologies, the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the continued fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine have forced companies to “reassess what they value in their relationships with their employees, their customers, and even their societies… Across industries and sectors, companies have been forced to ask themselves, “What do we stand for?” and “What binds us to one another and to the community?” Through their research, the authors discovered, “They discovered that when a company’s official values match those of its employees—a situation they call values alignment—the benefits include higher job satisfaction, less turnover, better teamwork, more-effective communication, bigger contributions to the organization, and more-productive negotiations, not to mention more diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

The authors developed a five-step approach for values alignment. The first step is to identify the values within your employee base and create what they call a “values structure” which represents “the eight values that are most significant for each individual and the interdependencies that person perceives among them. For example, someone might believe that pursuing excellence will help satisfy the value of achievement.” Step two is to identify key priorities from strategy to determine “What is the most important thing the organization can do to achieve its strategy?” This determination will allow you align your official values with your organization’s mission.

The next step is to wed values that serve both the organization and its employees. Here you can use a group or groups of employees to make these connections to create value statements based upon the outputs from steps one and two. You may create many value statements, but these can be refined down. The authors note, “values alignment does not require exact matches; someone who identifies achievement as an individual value is likely to feel aligned with a similar organizational value—say, accomplishment. So you have some flexibility in creating your potential value statements.”

Next, in step four, you should begin the assessment process. Here try to be as wide and inclusive as possible. The authors state, “any member of the organization whose input is significant to its ultimate success should be invited to weigh in.” The benefits are clear as the more employees and other stakeholders involved, the wider the engagement will be going forward. This will lead to greater buy-in at the end of the day as well. The fifth and final step is to generate a final list of organizational values. In this process, senior management may become more involved.

The authors concluded their article by noting, “when properly aligned, values are powerful. They serve your strategy and provide your employees with authentic connections, and in so doing they create a foundation for better group performance and higher personal satisfaction. But values are not magic. They don’t become real or effective just because you announce them to your organization in a town hall meeting or etch them into marble at HQ. If you want to enjoy their benefits, you need to work with everybody in your organization to identify and align them. That requires the kind of careful attention and hard work that we’ve described in this article. We can assure you that it’s worth it.”

From the compliance perspective, the protocol the authors have set out can be quite useful. Recognizing that values are but one part of an overall corporate culture, this gives you a mechanism to think through how to begin an overall assessment of your organization. Values do make a portion of an overall culture. Through the engagement advocated herein, you can not only get a good reading on such key values as trust and respect, but, more importantly, learn how to incorporate them as overall assets into your corporate culture.

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Innovation in Compliance

Corporate Case Management in the Era of the DoJ’s Monaco Memo: Episode 1-A Speak-Up Culture

Welcome to a special podcast series, Corporate Case Management in the Era of the DoJ’s Monaco Memo, sponsored by i-Sight Software Solutions. Over this series, we detail the changes wrought by the Monaco Memo and how compliance professionals can respond to these new challenges. In this Part 1, we look at the role of a speak-up culture in responding to the DOJ changes set out in the Monaco Memo. Highlights include:

  • What did the Monaco Memo say about corporate culture?
  • What is a ‘speak-up culture?
  • How do we encourage and foster a speak-up culture?  
  • Why is setting expectations critical to creating and maintaining a speak-up culture?
  • How a speak-up culture can provide valuable compliance and business operations information.

For more information, check out i-Sight here.

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Blog

The Nets and a Failure of Corporate Culture

What is corporate culture? What are ethical values? What is integrity at your organization? All of these questions are critical to the success of any business. Unfortunately, we usually see the answers to these questions play out in the negative. This week the Brooklyn Nets hit the trifecta of negative answers to all the above.

It all started out with a tweet from that noted freethinker (i.e., flatworlder & anti-vaxxer) Kyrie Irving who, according to Rolling Stone magazine, took to Twitter to boost a movie and book, Hebrews to Negroes, stuffed with antisemitic tropes. The movie espouses ideas in line with more extreme factions of the Black Hebrew Israelites, which have a long history of misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and especially antisemitism. If that was not bad enough, when asked to explain himself in a post-game press conference, Irving was shocked, shocked that anyone would question him, saying according to ESPN, he “does not believe he did anything wrong in promoting an antisemitic film and book on his social media accounts.”

The condemnation was swift from the Nets and other National Basketball Association (NBA) players. According to Rolling Stone, as an organization, “The Brooklyn Nets strongly condemn and have no tolerance for the promotion of any form of hate speech. We believe that in these situations, our first action must be open, honest dialogue. We thank those, including the ADL, who have been supportive during this time.” The Nets owner Joe Tsai also issued a statement Friday night on Twitter expressing, “I’m disappointed that Kyrie appears to support a film based on a book full of anti-Semitic disinformation. I want to sit down and make sure he understands this is hurtful to all of us, and as a man of faith, it is wrong to promote hate based on race, ethnicity or religion.” He added, “This is bigger than basketball.”

Nets (then-more on that below) coach Steve Nash said in Basketball News, “”I just hope that we all go through this together,” Nash said before the Nets game against the Indiana Pacers. “There’s always an opportunity for us to grow and understand new perspectives. “I think the organization is trying to take that stance where we can communicate through this. And try to all come out in a better position and both more understanding and more empathy for every side of this debate and situation,” Nash added.”

According to SI.com, “the Inside the NBA crew of Ernie Johnson, Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal had strong opinions on the” tweet and events.  “Barkley and O’Neal didn’t pull any punches in ripping Irving, with both hosts referring to him as “an idiot.” Barkley expressed his disappointment that the NBA didn’t suspend Irving, while Shaq called out Irving.”

What does a company do when one of its top producers lays out an antisemitic tweet? Why of course it fires the coach. Of course, the Nets said was it was based on the team’s abysmal start. GM Sean Marks said, “a change is necessary at this time. ESPN noted “it’s exceptionally rare for an NBA coach to be let go on a game day, much less roughly 12 hours after a win (the Nets beat the Indiana Pacers 116-109 on Monday night). Marks explained the business decision had been in the works for days. If the timeline he refers to here is accurate, these conversations would have actually started only a few days into the 2022-23 regular season.” Although Marks said the players had no input into the decision to fire Nash, nothing gets done on the Nets without the input of its star player Kevin Durant. In other words, Irving puts out an antisemitic tweet and the coach is fired. All of that sounds like NCAA enforcement back in the day where when Ohio State was caught violating the recruiting rules, Western Kentucky got put on probation.

But it even gets worse from a culture, reputational and integrity perspective next. Apparently, the Nets are aiming to hire the suspended Boston Celtics head coach Ido Udoka. Udoka was suspended before the season started, according to The Athletic for “having an intimate relationship with a female member of the Celtics organization. The Celtics front office determined Udoka’s actions were unacceptable, and he was unfit to coach the team he had just led to the NBA Finals. They suspended the second-year coach for the entirety of the 2022-23 season.”

The Athletic (and even WOJ) reported that Udoka is on the verge of being awarded the same job in a different organization, not even two months into his suspension. The article went on to ask, “And what about the Nets? Did they even think about the women who work in their organization and how they would be affected by such a hire? Hiring Udoka is a slap in the face to all of those women and women everywhere.”

What is the culture of the Nets? I went to the Nets website to review their Code of Conduct but it is entitled, NBA Fan Code of Conduct. No policy on harassment, discrimination or anything else. Even the Houston Astros had a policy against abuse towards women when they decided it only applied to Astros players and not players from other teams when they traded for Roberto Osuna.

Where is the NBA in all of this? Nowhere to be seen apparently. Once again, I went to the NBA website and no public facing Code of Conduct for itself or its teams.

What does all of this say about the culture, ethics and integrity of the Net? I will leave you to conjugate on that question. What would you do when a top producer violates an accepted norm by supporting a clearly antisemitic movie? Do you think he can claim that there was nothing in the Code of Conduct about it as the Nets apparently have no Code of Conduct? What does it say about its romancing of a new head coach who is currently under suspension for having an inappropriate relationship with a female team employee that the Celtics considered a violation of the team’s organizational guidelines. What will it mean for female employees? Will or even can they ever trust him?

And everyone thought the culture of the Washington Football Team was the worst in sports.

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Corruption, Crime and Compliance

Episode 251 – Training and Corporate Culture: Interview of Maria D’Avanzo, Chief Evangelist Officer, Traliant

powered by Sounder

Does compliance training have to be boring? Our guest explains how your organization can make compliance training engaging and fun for your employees.

Maria D’Avanzo is the Chief Evangelist Officer at Traliant. Maria provides key insights on corporate ethics and compliance training programs. Maria describes how to take your training program to the next level and tailor the content to deliver training on important issues based on your company’s risk assessment..

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Corruption, Crime and Compliance

Episode 247 – Corporate Culture Round Up

Corporate culture is all the rage now, meaning it is an often used topic to signal commitment, sensitivity to issues of employee concern, and awareness of governance trends. In practice, as we all know, culture is not just about words but about action. As the often repeated phrase goes — talk is cheap. In this Corporate Culture Roundup Episode, Michael Volkov examines some culture-related issues involving: Culture + Action Steps, Civility in the Workplace, and What Happens when HR and Compliance are Disconnected.

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Innovation in Compliance

Assessing Corporate Culture with Ty Francis

 

Ty Francis is a renowned compliance leader and the Chief Advisory Officer at LRN; he leads the company’s worldwide ethics and compliance consulting, ESG, and community outreach strategy. Tom Fox welcomes him to this week’s episode of Innovation In Compliance to discuss LRN’s new report, Assessing Corporate Culture. 

 

 

The Genesis of the Assessing Corporate Culture Report

Tom asks Ty about the genesis of the LRN report. This is the second report LRN produced; the first one was about activating culture and ethics in the boardroom. Their previous research led the team at LRN to realize that most corporate boards did not understand the culture. Ty says, “Over the last 10 years, culture is so high on those lists, but when you look further into the survey and ask them what they’ve done to measure this culture, it’s nonexistent.” Therefore, LRN sought to discover the general opinion on culture and ethics compliance and provide a roadmap on how to activate these skills within a company. 

 

Roadmap for Building Corporate Culture

Tom highlights how the report can be used as a roadmap to building culture. Ty says that building corporate culture starts with defining ethical culture. Ethical culture is the codification of what an organization stands for and the systems that support those beliefs; the core architecture should be reinforced by leadership in how they model desired behavior. The second step in building culture is getting to know the most valuable members within your company, in each department. Culture is extremely important for building relationships within a company and allowing people to hear opinions from all sides. 

 

The Relationship Between ESG and Corporate Culture

The culture within a corporate setting has always been an ESG issue. The governance aspect of ESG is directly related to culture as it is something that companies should have been implementing for years. Ty remarks, “It shows the company’s values across the board and I think when you have a mismatch of what the company says it’s doing and what they are really doing, that can fragment any ability for a company to demonstrate that it is really a forward-thinking, future-expanding company.” The governance is to be upheld by the board, stewards, stakeholders, and managers. He lists five key considerations for boards: 

  • prioritizing culture on the board agenda, 
  • challenging the board’s culture, 
  • mentoring and monitoring, 
  • articulating the desired culture, and 
  • establishing clear communication.

 

Looking Ahead

Acknowledging the new legal and regulatory requirements, public pressure, and the evolution of thinking surrounding corporate culture, Tom asks Ty if he believes that boards will maintain the corporate culture into 2025 and beyond. Ty believes these pressures will force boards to manage and maintain the corporate culture. 

Resources

Ty Francis | LinkedIn | Twitter

LRN | LRN Report – Assessing Corporate Culture

 

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Sunday Book Review

August 14, 2022 the Culture edition

In today’s edition of Sunday Book Review:

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Lencioni

Culture by Design: How to Build a High-Performing Culture, Even in the New Remote Work Environment by David J. Friedman

The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle

Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar H. Schein with Peter Schein

Winning Behavior: What the Smartest, Most Successful Companies Do Differently by Terry R. Bacon and David G. Pugh

Resource

5 Top Books on Corporate Culture

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GalloCast

Welcome to the Gallocast-Episode 1


Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Gallocast. You have heard of the Manningcast in football. Now we have the Gallocast in compliance. The two top brothers in compliance, Nick and Gio Gallo come together for a free form exploration of compliance topics. It is great insights on compliance brought to you by the co-CEOs of ComplianceLine. Fun, witty, insightful with a dash of the two brothers throughout. It’s like listening to the Brothers Gallo talk compliance at the dinner table. Hosted by Tom Fox, the Voice of Compliance. Topics in this episode include:
·      Return to office, WFH or hybrid?
·      Moderna CFO lasts for 1 day.
·      Keeping culture positive during acquisition?
·      ESG and climate reporting.
·      Howard Schultz goes on a listening tour.
·      When should a startup put in a compliance program?
·      Did we learn anything during the pandemic to end or at least reduce useless meetings?
·      What does Ukraine War mean for compliance?
·      What can top management do to ‘talk the talk’.
Resources
Nick Gallo on LinkedIn
Gio Gallo on LinkedIn
ComplianceLine

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Compliance Into the Weeds

DOJ Expectations for Compliance & CCOs


Compliance into the Weeds is the only weekly podcast that takes a deep dive into a compliance-related topic, literally going into the weeds to more fully explore a subject. This week, Matt and Tom take a deep dive into the recent speech by Kenneth Polite, the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division. Every compliance professional needs to read his remarks in-depth as they give significant insight into what the DOJ expects in compliance programs and CCOs involved in enforcement actions. Highlights include:

  • It all starts with a risk assessment.
  • The importance of culture.
  • Continuous testing and continuous improvement.
  • The role of monitors.
  • CCO certification going forward.

Resources
Matt in Radical Compliance