November 1-7  is Compliance and Ethics Week. I wanted to give you some ideas on how you might use this week’s designation to help bring the message of compliance and ethics to your organization. An oft-raised topic is how to drive effective communication around compliance down through your organization. As many Chief Compliance Officers (CCOs) and compliance practitioners well know ethical leadership is absolutely mandatory to have a successful compliance program, whether it is based upon the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) or the UK Bribery Act. Senior management must not only be committed to doing business in compliance with these laws but they must communicate these commitments down to the organization. But leadership is not limited only to senior management within an organization. Tone at the Top begets Tone in the Middle; which begets Tone at the Bottom. At each rung there is the need for compliance leadership. In an article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), entitled “Leadership is a Conversation”, authors Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind discuss how to improve employee engagement in today’s “flatter, more networked organizations.”

The authors posit that the issue of how leaders handle communications within their organizations is as important as the message. They believe that the process should be more dynamic and more nuanced and is a process that they term “conversational”. Building on this concept they suggest a model of leadership that they call “organizational conversation” which resembles ordinary person-to-person conversations. They believe that this model has several advantages, including that it allows a large company to function like a small one and it can enable leaders to “retain or recapture some of the qualities…that enable start-ups to out-perform better established rivals.” The authors have found four elements of organizational conversation that “reflect the essential attributes of an interpersonal conversation.” They are: intimacy, interactivity, inclusion and intentionality. 

Intimacy: Getting Close

Here the authors appear to focus on two works: listening and authenticity. Recognizing that physical proximity may not always be feasible but emotional or mental proximity is required. They advise leaders to “step down from their corporate perches and then step up to the challenge of communicating personally and transparently with their people.” This technique shifts the focus of change from a top-down hierarchical model to a “bottom-up exchange of ideas.”

 Interactivity: Promoting Dialogue

Interactivity should make a conversation open and more fluid. You can obtain this by talking with and not just talking to an employee. The purpose of interactivity builds upon the first prong of intimacy. The authors believe that efforts to close the gap between employees will founder if both tools are not in place along with institutional support that gives employees the freedom and courage to speak up. The authors believe that social media can be a useful tool to help foster such interactivity, but care must be taken to ensure that managers do not simply use social media as another megaphone. The authors suggest that more than just social media is required and that something extra is needed and that is social thinking.

 Inclusion: Expanding Employees Roles

Following on intimacy is inclusion as intimacy should force a leader to get closer to employees while inclusion challenges the employee to play a greater role in the communication process. Inclusion expands on interactivity by enabling employees to put forward their ideas “rather than simply parrying the ideas that others present.” Clearly this is the prong that brings employee engagement into the communication process by calling on employees to “generate the content that makes up a company story.” Employees who become committed to a message can become the best brand ambassadors that a company can ever hope to have on its payroll.

 Intentionality: Pursuing an Agenda

While the first three prongs of the authors’ model focuses on opening up the flow of communication, intentionality is designed to bring a measure of closure to the process. The goal here is to have voices merge into a single vision of what the company’s communication stands for. In other words, the conversation should reflect a “shared agenda that aligns with the company’s strategic objectives” that will allow employees to “derive a strategically relevant action from the push and pull of discussion and debate.” The leaders role here is to “generate consent rather than commanding assent” for a strategic objective. The authors believe that this enables employees at the top; at the middle, and at the bottom to “gain a big-picture view of where their company stands” on any issue which has gone through the process.

Company Events

During its annual celebration of this week one company I know used it as a springboard to internally publicize its compliance program. Their efforts included three separate, yet inter-related, initiatives: hosting inter-company events to highlight the company’s compliance program; providing employees with a Brochure highlighting the company’s compliance philosophy and circulating a Booklet which provided information on the company’s compliance hotline and Compliance Department personnel.

These were ‘Lunch-N-Learn’ events hosted throughout the week. Topics included:

• Monday: Navigate and Learn the Corporate Compliance Website;
• Tuesday: How to Determine if You Have a Conflict of Interest;
• Wednesday: Review of the company’s pre-approval procedures for gifts, travel and entertainment of non-US officials and employees of State Owned Enterprises;
• Thursday: Understanding the purpose and importance of the Company’s Alertline; and
• Friday: Ethical Behavior that Wins Business and Attracts Top Talent.

Participation in these events allowed the Compliance Department to meet informally with the business unit folks. Even in a corporate headquarters, most conferences are more formalized training but the ‘Lunch-N-Learn’ concept provides a more casual atmosphere and, therefore, better opportunities for interaction. 

Cost: Sandwiches for lunch

Brochure

The Company regularly distributes a short Compliance Brochure. In the Brochure, which announced the company’s celebration of Compliance Week, it included the following phraseology that I quote in its entirety as I thought it was so eye-catching. The Brochure had spelled out ‘Compliance’ vertically and assigned phrases to each letter so that it reads as follows:

Commit to ‘Doing the Right Thing’

Observe the policies that apply to your job

Make compliance awareness a part of your job

Put Code of Conduct in accessible place

Lead by example

If in doubt, check it out

Attend educational and mandatory training sessions

Notify your supervisor of possible wrongdoings

Communicate openly and honestly

Ethics is a part of all activities

In addition to the above phrasing the Brochure included information on the Company hotline; contact information for the Compliance Department and a listing of some of the information available on the Company’s internal intranet site.

Cost: Printer paper

Compliance Booklet

The final piece of information provided during the company’s Compliance Week celebration was a four-page Booklet given to each employee, specifically tailored to the Compliance Week celebration. It listed out several elements from the company’s compliance program and its Vision and Core Values. Again it also provided the contact information on the Company hotline and contact information on the Compliance Department personnel. One of the most interesting things it listed was the company’s Compliance Department philosophy about what it believed it owed the company’s employees. This included the following:

• Guidance on the policies and procedures that apply to your duties
• Training to enable your compliance with all applicable policies and procedures
• Monitoring to ensure compliance with policies, procedures and laws
• An environment that will not tolerate retaliation against those who report compliance concerns in good faith

Cost: Thick printer paper

The key to communication is that it is done effectively. You can and should use this week’s designation to raise awareness in your company. If you can neither think of anything else nor have the budget for celebrating Compliance and Ethics Week, you can always start with the FCPA Guidance and use the hypotheticals as your materials. I still maintain that in communications you are only limited by your own imagination. By keeping the communications fun, fresh and relevant, you can help keep the eye on compliance in your organization.

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