Compliance and Ethics: Ideas & Answers. Edition 82

Dear friends,

Welcome to the 82nd edition of Compliance and Ethics: Ideas & Answers.

In "You Can Teach Compliance, But You Can’t Teach Ethics", Adam Balfour challenges the notion that ethics are fixed and unchangeable. Through an analogy of wading into cold water, Adam explores how our ethical standards can shift gradually based on our environments and experiences, especially in the workplace. He highlights the risks of “ethical fading” and emphasizes the need for constant vigilance to stay true to our values in environments that may push us to compromise them.

Next, I delve into the practical side of compliance in "Testing Out Your Speak-Up System." I remind you that while having a speak-up system is essential, ensuring its functionality is even more critical. I emphasize the importance of regularly testing these systems to demonstrate their effectiveness, not only to employees but also to regulators and government agencies.

Finally, in our regular feature Compliance Lite, we take a moment to celebrate our growing global subscriber base with a fun quiz! We invite you to guess how many countries have visited our Ideas & Answers website and where your country ranks. Join the conversation and see how far our community has spread.

And don't forget there's more content on our website so please do visit us there to read our other articles.

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Thank you, Joe.

“You can teach compliance, but you can’t teach ethics”

by Adam Balfour

The end of summer means that while outdoor swimming is still fun, it is not like the height of summer when the water is warm and refreshing compared to the heat (and humidity) of Tennessee summers. Last weekend, rather than jumping in the deep end and quickly getting used to the cooler water, I did the painful walk in and paused every step to get adjusted to the temperature. After 10 or so seconds, the water didn’t feel as bad and I took another step where the higher level of water hit me and I had to pause so that it no longer felt as uncomfortable.

I’ve heard various compliance professionals over the years say that you can teach people about compliance, but ethics is fixed and not something you can change by training in the workplace. While formal training in the workplace can certainly help people learn about compliance, I believe there are many ways that people will learn to adapt their ethical standards. Humans are social creatures and we adapt and change based on the environments we are in, the pressures we face and the people around us - that means our workplaces, where we spend a considerable amount of our lives, can significantly influence how we think and behave.

Just as each step into a cold pool is initially uncomfortable and then we soon adjust (both mentally and physically) to accept the temperature and move deeper, a workplace environment can, bit by bit, push us to uncomfortable ethical practices that we then adjust to and we continue to go deeper down a path that erodes and changes our ethical standards (this is also known as ethical fading).

While I do agree that it is harder to teach employees in a classroom setting about ethics as compared to compliance, we have to remember that classroom learning accounts for around 10% of adult learning - 20% comes from coaching and 70% from experiential learning. Our ethical standards are not fixed and we can learn to adjust our standards through our experiences.

Our jobs do more than simply give us our paychecks and support our careers - where you work can impact how you act, think and behave. If you are in an environment that does not have ethical practices and standards that are aligned with your own, you either need to be able to lead an ethical revolution in the organization (probably not going to happen btw) or you run the risk that you either won’t succeed in that environment if you stick to your values or that you are exposing yourself to an environment that puts you and your values at risk.

Testing Out Your Speak Up System

by Joe Murphy, CCEP

One of the core elements of any compliance program is the ability of people to speak up.? If there is wrongdoing it is essential that those who know about it speak up and raise questions. If employees are unsure about what they should be doing, the system should also provide a readily available resource for them to obtain guidance. While once this merely meant having a phone number that employees and others could reach, in today’s environment a speak up system should include more ways to make contact. Among different generations and groups, communications may still be done by phone, but it may also rely on text, email, or other online vehicles.

If you are in compliance and ethics, you very likely know this. But have you thought about what the impact would be if someone who has an urgent matter to report and is highly anxious about this, tries to contact a speak up system that does not work? Or who does use a system that accepts the report and who hears nothing back because of flaws in your system? The impact could be worse than having no system at all.??That scenario leads to a step that is reflected in idea 252 in the book, 501 Ideas for your Compliance and Ethics Program (SCCE; 2008). That is to test out your speak up system.? And while that once meant simply calling your helpline, it now calls for deeper steps, to test out all the available systems.

One of the key reasons for doing this is to be able to show the government you actually care about your compliance program and want to know if it works.? For the government, if you make a presentation to them to receive credit for your compliance program, as far as they are concerned, all you show them might be just formalistic box ticking. DOJ, in the Justice Manual, asks “whether a corporation’s compliance program is merely a ‘paper program’ or whether it was designed and implemented in an effective manner”. ?If you can show that you checked things it makes it clearer that your intent is real. ?You would not be checking it if it didn’t matter. The government expects you to be measuring whether the elements of your compliance program are “effective.”? This is a very practical way of hitting that target in one of the essential areas of your compliance program.? ??

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Global Reach: Test Your Knowledge of Our Worldwide Subscriber Community!

We are so fortunate to have such wonderful subscribers around the world and to see the number of our subscribers continue to grow.

Just for fun, we thought we would have a short quiz to highlight how our subscribers are helping to spread the word about Ideas & Answers.

Post your answers below and we will see who comes closest:

1. How many countries have we had visitors to our Ideas & Answers website from?
2. What do you think the top five countries are in terms of visitors?
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