Talking Values

In recent years, unprecedented freedom has entered the workplace as companies work to inspire their employees instead of coercing them with strict sets of rules. While this may seem like risky behavior for companies in highly-regulated industries, it may actually be riskier to rely on long lists of rules in our hyperconnected world. In this episode of Talking Values, host Michael Bramnick and LRN colleagues Wayne Brody and Caterina Bulgarella, PhD, will discuss the findings of LRN’s freedom index, found in the recently released Freedom Report and explore what companies can do to channel these new freedoms in positive ways for their workers.

“Program Effectiveness” is a term Ethics & Compliance (E&C) professionals frequently use as they strive to understand whether or not their companies’ investment and effort are paying off. Those who manage E&C programs generally collect and report whatever is immediately measurable, such as number of helpline calls or code violations, and while this information is helpful, it doesn’t tell us which programs are particularly effective or what those programs have in common. Every year, LRN conducts a survey of our client partners across the globe to get a pulse of which ethics and compliance tools work and which don’t work as well – and why. In this episode of Talking Values, host Michael Bramnick and LRN colleague Wayne Brody discuss this year’s E&C Survey and some of its surprising findings.

Thanks to Edward Snowden, whistleblowers have been a hot media topic lately. Snowden represents a pretty unique case, but the reality is that many companies deal with whistleblowing and its legal implications. Whistleblowers may either report misconduct to the internal ethics and compliance function at their company, or they may report it to a governmental agency. In this episode of Talking Values, host Michael Bramnick and LRN colleagues Mark Rowe and Keith Read discuss how ethics and compliance leaders should be thinking about whistleblowers, and how to handle both internal and external reporting.

Big banks seem to be in the press every day receiving massive fines, but it appears that they will be settling with the federal government to finally put a stop to litigation that has dogged the industry for the 5 years since the financial crisis due to credit default swaps on mortgages that crippled homeowners. In this episode of Talking Values, host Michael Bramnick and LRN colleagues Wayne Brody and Caterina Bulgarella PhD will discuss the deeper issues at play within these banks that allowed such risky behavior to happen in the first place. Caterina Bulgarella holds her PhD in Organizational Psychology from NYU, and has spent 10 years researching and analyzing how different company management policies affect employee behavior.

Companies have traditionally set ethics and compliance priorities by making policies that avoid past issues – but now, companies are encouraged to look forward and analyze a landscape of risk when it comes to compliance. Today, risk assessment is considered one of the hallmarks of an effective ethics and compliance programs and regulators are looking at whether or not an ethics and compliance program makes sense in a risk based context. In this episode of Talking Values, host Michael Bramnick and LRN colleagues Wayne Brody and Keith Read discuss why taking a fresh eye to risk requires a deep understanding of the way an organization works, and the importance of adapting your approach to risks and ethics & compliance as a whole as your business changes over time.

We all come to work with our own moral code and set of values. But sometimes, we have trouble voicing them when someone in a position of power asks something that, in our personal lives, we’d see as “wrong.” After all, it takes courage to tell a boss she might not be making a principled decision. An ethical workplace culture would allow room for employees to articulate – and then, if appropriate, act on – their values. In this episode of Talking Values, host Michael Bramnick, and LRN colleagues Dr. Marsha Ershagi-Hames and Dr. Ted Nunez, talk about how practice makes perfect when it comes to engaging employees in exercises that present relevant ethical dilemmas that are easy to identify with. In so doing, employees are able to collaborate with their colleagues and develop a sense of shared accountability with regard to voicing values in the workplace.

Part of a Board of Directors' mandate is to know about the content and operations of a company’s ethics and compliance program, and to have “reasonable oversight” of its implementation and effectiveness. For Compliance Officers, two concerns immediately come to mind. First, what information does the Board of Directors need to ensure that they are ‘knowledgeable’ about the program? Second, what constitutes ‘reasonable oversight’?  Host Michael Bramnick and LRN colleagues Keith Read and Wayne Brody discuss the answers to both – and the timing of letting the board know about a compliance concern.

One mark of an impactful Ethics and Compliance program is by helping employees practice how they can handle tough situations.  While many company programs measure their impact by the range of topics covered and frequency of education, and while these are important factors, it's also important to consider the effectiveness of the delivery. We all learn in different ways, and blended (or live) learning can use a combination of a visual or text prompt, open discussion, and instruction from an in-person professional, is a highly effective way to model and practice ethical behavior. In this installment of Talking Values, Host Michael Bramnick, and LRN colleagues Dr. Marsha Ershagi-Hames and Dr. Ted Nunez, explore blended learning as a strategy to facilitate engaging ethics and compliance education.

Aligning employee behavior in regions where local values conflict with organizational values is a main concern for multinational companies. Considering that behavior is an outcome of culture, multinational companies should perform due diligence on local cultures to inspire employees, identify local cultural norms that align with core organizational values, and mitigate against behaviors that could lead to costly compliance violations. In this segment of Talking Values, host Michael Bramnick and LRN colleagues Wayne Brody and Keith Read speak to their experiences operating in and collaborating with multinational companies and the importance of determining a global standard for employee behavior.

Creating an ethical corporate culture means inspiring behavior that reinforces ethical decision-making. There’s a bevy of new research on how we develop, change and adapt our own and others’ behaviors. One key finding: we make ethical decisions through intuition and emotion, rather than rational thinking. Citing the research of Max Bazerman, Ann Tenbrunsel, Daniel Kahneman and Chris Argyris, LRN colleagues Marsha Ershagi-Hames and Ted Nunez, along with host Michael Bramnick, speak to the implications these insights have on ethics education in the workplace and drill down specific strategies to catalyze behavior change.  

Given the patchwork of business ethics regulations (from the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Guidelines and the United Kingdom’s Bribery Act), it can be unclear which legal standards actually apply to any given global company. Things get even more fuzzy when ethics and compliance professionals are tasked with building an adequate E&C program – is it best practice to tailor the program to one specific regulatory policy or be more comprehensive? In this installment of Talking Values, host Michael Bramnick and LRN colleagues Wayne Brody and Keith Read explore these questions and, more importantly, how compliance can be an outcome of the organization’s behavior, culture and values.

In the wake of the tragic Bangladesh garment factory collapse, supply chain integrity has once again stimulated an intense media reaction – it seems that with each supply chain scandal, the headlines increase. Reinforcing the backlash are questions about ethics, responsibility and safety. Who should be held responsible for supply chain disasters? How should big companies evaluate potential risks along their supply chains, in order to prevent disaster? Is there a best response to supply chain safety violations to ensure they don’t happen again? In this episode of LRN’s Talking Values, host Michael Bramnick and LRN colleagues Wayne Brody and Keith Read speak to these questions and offer ideas for how ethics and compliance officers can help prevent supply chain tragedies.

Ethics and compliance – even the two words taken together are a mash-up of philosophy and law. Deciding who runs a company’s ethics and compliance (E&C) program can be just as thorny, especially for companies looking to go beyond complying with the latest regulations to elevate behavior across their whole organizations. Some maintain that the CEO or the Board of Directors should be the ultimate leaders of E&C. Others contend that the responsibility should be designated to the Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer. Still, if the goal of the Ethics and Compliance function is to elevate behavior throughout the organization maybe all employees have a duty to own responsibility for E&C. In this installment of Talking Values, host Michael Bramnick and LRN colleagues Mark Rowe and Keith Read discuss who should own responsibility for an organization’s E&C program and why a holistic approach may be best.

It can be easy to toil away off in one corner of a big enterprise. But the best ethics and compliance officers see themselves as central to the mission, strategy and business development of their companies. They often reach out to the whole company to make sure they are well-known and approachable. Also, by getting close to other company leaders, compliance officers can ensure that when ethics and compliance issues do arise, they can be resolved in collaboration with the heads of the various departments of the organization. Still, there can be resistance from those who see ethics and compliance as ancillary to business strategy and development. Michael Bramnick and his LRN colleagues Wayne Brody and Paul Liebman discuss this tension and explore ways to integrate ethics and compliance with other key business functions.

The role of the Ethics and Compliance Officer can vary widely – at different companies, a Compliance Officer may also serve as the General Counsel, Head of Internal Audit or Head of Litigation. Do these additional roles help the Compliance Officer to function more efficiently and have a broader understanding of company challenges and opportunities? Or do the obligations of these roles detract from compliance-specific responsibilities? As former compliance officers, the group on this podcast gets pretty passionate on this subject. Listen for specific examples that help illustrate what approaches can work to fulfill their goals of complying with government regulation and setting a higher bar of inculcating a values-based culture.