CONVERGE is in its 5th year of bringing together the world’s leading companies for 2 days of dynamic speakers, thought-provoking breakout sessions, and opportunities to connect with like-minded professionals. This year the conference has gone virtual. You will leave the conference with new resources and best practices allowing you to continue the hard work of driving ethics to the center of your business. In today’s episode I visit with Russ Berland, Chief Integrity and Risk Officer at Aventiv Technologies. We visit about his presentation at Converge20 on The Ethics Movement Part 1: Aligning your Allies. In this interactive session Berland will share experiences and techniques to truly engage other departments as champions of your program, enabling greater efficiency, trust and communication. In 2020 and beyond, ethics and compliance not only deserve a seat at the table—it demands cross-collaboration from your peers. Sometimes, you have to bring pizza. For more registration and information on Converge20, click here.
Tag: Russ Berland
Russ Berland is back on this episode of The Compliance Life to share how he uses creative communication to change compliance culture.
Changing Culture at BearingPoint
Tom Fox credits Russ with being one of the first persons to come up with a compliance movie. Russ relates that the lack of an integrated culture was one of the biggest issues at BearingPoint in 2007. His goal was to build company culture, and expectations around the same. Research suggested that they should start with their training, so Russ and his team came up with the idea of a series of videos – a “mockumentary” – similar to The Office. The team gathered stories from employees, which became inspiration for the script.
The first series of videos about the fictional Agreva Group was a phenomenal success. Russ relates that the “magic for us was that because they were our own stories, the people at BearingPoint recognized them and empathized with them…” After each six minute episode, a senior official would talk about the policies that applied to the situation portrayed in the video, and what the characters should have done. Russ comments that the training was the talk of the company: people eagerly looked forward to the release of the next episode, and diagnostic surveys showed marked cultural change as a result. One of their employees even became a local celebrity from acting in the series. They subsequently created a column and a second series of videos.
Tom comments that using the employees’ stories not only made them more targeted and engaged in the series, but also allowed Russ to gather information. Their post-diagnostic surveys helped them to measure the effectiveness of the training. Russ adds that engaging the senior leadership to talk on the videos made them the mouthpiece for the culture they were trying to create, while setting the tone from the top.
Resources
Aventiv Technologies
Tom Fox chats with the Chief Compliance Officer at Aventiv Technologies, Russ Berland, in the premiere episode of The Compliance Life. They discuss the lessons Russ learned as a compliance officer and how it relates to pizza.
Pizza Is The Key To Success
Tom asks why Russ believes that pizza is the key to success as a compliance officer. Russ responds that compliance often functions in a silo; however, to be effective, a compliance officer must be engaged with everyone who has influence within the company. “I found the secret weapon in that arsenal to build those relationships,” Russ says, “was to buy lots and lots of pizza, and I would bring together these groups of all these people, have strategy sessions. It was funny that when the pizza came out, people started talking, sharing about what was really going on in the organization, who they were as people, what they were looking for and it broke down a lot of the barriers.” He learned this strategy at Hewlett Packard. Connecting with people is the key to success, he emphasizes
His Compliance Life
Russ details his journey from associate general counsel at Compaq to compliance officer. As a consequence of the merger with Hewlett Packard, a large part of the legal department at Compaq was being phased out. He was offered the opportunity to join the newly formed compliance department, which he accepted. He had real life experience using the skills they needed, so he was a natural fit. He describes how he helped streamline their internal investigation process to a multi-disciplinary one with governance. Throughout his career, Russ says, he has worked in compliance and investigations on all six inhabited continents
Resources
Aventiv Technologies
Russ Berland on LinkedIn
