Corporate Ethics Is a Journey, Not a Destination… So Wear Comfortable Shoes
Like many parts of a business, an ethics program is not immune to ongoing challenges. The assaults against stability are continuous, diverse, and often far outside your control. In the world of ethics, as in life, it seems that the only certainty is uncertainty, and the only constant is change.
Change Management
Let’s talk about just two of the changes you should prepare to manage:
Changing Regulatory Landscape
As ethics professionals, we generally feel like we try to be aware of the issues from various regulatory bodies around the world and we strive to strengthen our policies as a foundation of defense to remain compliant. With the right policies in place, we can shift our focus to training and making certain that our constituents who are impacted by those policy changes are well-informed and agree to follow them. We have the systems in place to close the loop and allow (and encourage) the reporting, anonymous or otherwise, when violations inevitably occur and must be investigated and resolved.
If the world could only live with the laws and regulations we already have, we’d be done, right? Alas, it’s an ever-changing landscape, made even more challenging by the globalization of both businesses AND regulations. This constant turmoil in the laws and regulations that cause us to manage change and create policies can often be conflicting, complex, and confusing. The most obvious examples here are privacy issues, headlined by the 2018 launch of GDPR, the EU’s General Data Privacy Requirements. Show me a compliance professional who did not lose sleep over implementing the changes necessary to comply with GDPR and other similar global changes, and I’ll show you a compliance professional with their head in the sand.
Shifting Demographics and Social Norms
Seeing social norms and taking note of them are equally important to be on top of regulatory change. Just like rules, social norms are temporary, subject to rapid change, and dizzying in their complexity and nuance. The impact that the privacy issues had on the regulatory world was surpassed in the eyes of many by the #metoo movement and the shift in acceptable norms regarding sexual harassment. Long overdue adjustments did not come from new regulations, but from new social norms defining what is acceptable.
The effects, whether from the top down in the form of new regulatory compliance issues or the bottom up from evolving social norms, both eventually meet in the middle – on the desk of the compliance professional.
Picking the Right Shoes
When you’re hiking a trail in a national park, the right hiking shoes that combine protection, stability, and comfort are critical. But those same hiking boots at the beach are heavy, uncomfortable, and filled with sand. At a formal event like a wedding, those flip flops you wore to the beach that were so perfect that day are out of place and tough to dance in.
Much like shoes are there to provide protection, stability, and comfort, ethics programs are as well. The difference is that you can easily swap your shoes based on circumstance, but ethics programs are much tougher to manage change on a whim. There’s simply too much interdependence on the various disciplines associated with the execution of an ethics program.
What are the fundamentals of an ethics program which will provide the protection, stability, and comfort that you search for in a corporate ethics program?
As an organization, we need and expect our employees to follow our policies, and we develop those policies to protect our organization from running afoul of legal, regulatory, and even social norms. This means policies that are easy to create, maintain, and update without an undue burden or expense. We gain stability from consistent enforcement of policy violations and comfort from our employees and constituents being able to easily understand and internalize our policies in a meaningful way, not seeing them as a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo.
The ETHIX360 blog brings you weekly updates on all things human resources and compliance.
MEET THE AUTHOR
J Rollins is the co-founder and CEO of ETHIX360. J is a well known leader and innovator who has served on senior leadership teams ranging in responsibility from Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, SVP of Product Strategy and Chief Operating Officer.
ABOUT ETHIX360
At ETHIX360, our goal is simple: to provide an affordable, flexible, and comprehensive answer to employee communication, policy management, corporate training and case management on issues related to corporate ethics, code of conduct, fraud, bribery, and workplace violence.
