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Ethikos Editor’s Weekly Picks: How to Make Ethics Training Stick

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Examining ethics and compliance issues in business since 1987

How to make ethics training stick

By Mark Athitakis  for Associations Now
Ethics matters. On this, everybody agrees. The CEO will tell you that. The ethics seminar leader will tell you that. Even the staffer who was catching up on email while half-listening to that last ethics webinar everybody had to watch will tell you that.

Recognizing the importance of ethics is one thing. But getting people to actively engage with the issues that workplace ethics presents is another. Read more

Opinion: Here’s how you know if a company is behaving badly

By Ann Skeet for Market Watch
One multinational company headquartered in Silicon Valley used a culture assessment tool we’ve developed, with useful results. This company had a CEO and a lead independent director interested in signaling the workplace about the importance of ethics and a bias towards learning.  The discussion at the board meeting reviewing the results extended well beyond the original time allotted.  Read more

A leadership lesson learned on the battlefield

By Jonathan Aberman for The Washington Post
Subordinates are given autonomy to make rapid decisions in the moment, if necessary, to achieve the strategic goals of leadership. But it is not complete autonomy. Servant leaders require accountability against their expressed goals. This ensures that key values such as ethics and compliance with legal and other norms are honored and that the overall strategic objectives articulated by the leader are followed.  Read more

ACCA survey finds need for improved ethics in digital age

By Michael Cohn for Accounting Today
The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants has released a new survey raising questions about how accountants and businesses around the world are dealing with ethical challenges prompted by various technology trends.

Ethics was considered a “very important” skill in the digital age by 77 percent of the respondents, with more than nine out of 10 giving ethics a top rating. An above-average proportion of respondents in the nonprofit and public sectors indicated they considered ethics as “very important” in the digital age. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents called for strong ethical leadership, while a 54 percent majority called for guidance on a new code of ethics for the digital age. Read more

General Counsel: Guardian and conscience of the company

By Mark A. Cohen for Forbes
I was recently invited by the ABA to address a group of General Counsel on “Lawyers as Guardians of Business Integrity and Conscience of the Company.” The topic was chosen because of a spate of high-profile scandals and regulatory imbroglios that resulted in no small part from the failure of GC’s to discharge the guardian/conscience role.

General counsel—and large corporate departments– are law’s petri dish. They are reconfiguring the boundaries and expanding the expectations of what it means to be an effective corporate lawyer. Read more
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Selfie Time: What Could Go Wrong?

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By Margaret Scavotto, JD
Director of Compiance Services
Management Performance Associates

A nurse aide, lab tech, medical assistant – or any other healthcare employee  – is new on the job. They are excited about their new position and decide to take a selfie to memorialize the occasion, then send it off to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat, with the click of a button, in under 20 seconds. What could go wrong?

Or maybe this employee is not new on the job. Maybe they’ve been with you quite a while, through ups and downs – lately, mostly downs – had a challenging time at home last night, and are feeling fed up. They pick up the phone, put on their best “exasperated” face, take a selfie, caption it with a summary of their frustrated state of mind, and send it off.  What could go wrong?

Next consider a great day at work. This employee had a great performance review, met a team goal or helped a patient meet a milestone – and is proud. What better way to celebrate than by capturing that smile on camera and sharing the good news with 856 social media friends? Think of all of the “likes” and “thumbs ups” they will get to see on their next break. What could go wrong? [Read more…]

The Opposite of Compliance

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By Adam Turteltaub
adam.turteltaub@corporatecompliance.org

When you ask most compliance professionals, “What’s the opposite of compliance?” my bet is the most common answer is “Non-compliance.”  The New York Times disagrees.  In a recent article it paired jobs with their opposites, and according to them, the opposite of a compliance officer is…are you ready for this?….a model.

Shows how little they know about compliance.  In fact, according to their own list of job attributes, modeling and compliance have a lot in common.

Number one on their list of skills models use the most is “The ability to maintain balance.”  Anyone who has spent any time around compliance professionals knows that maintaining your balance is critical to the job.  With bad news flying in every day, recalcitrant employees throwing objections at you, and management that can sometimes hurl obstacles in your path, it’s enough to make your head spin.  Without the ability to maintain balance, you’re sunk.

Number eight on the list for models is stamina.  Hello?  Since when does a job in compliance involve strolling in at 10:00, kicking your feet up, and caving in at the first objection you receive?  It takes more stamina than running a marathon.  Some days it’s like pushing a rock up hill, into the wind, with ice under your feet.  If that’s not stamina, I don’t know what is.

Number ten on the model list is “Dynamic strength.”  I think few people business have to demonstrate more strength in fast-changing dynamic situations than compliance officers.

Finally, one item that isn’t on the list that should be:  both models and compliance officers have to be comfortable with people watching their every move and picking them apart.  You think strutting down a catwalk is hard, try walking down the halls when a major investigation is going on.

Bottom line is that the New York Times got it wrong on this one.  Compliance officers aren’t models, but in more ways than one, they daily exhibit a model life.

Have fun seeing for yourself.

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CEOs Increasingly Scrutinized for Ethical Lapses

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By Steve Treagus
EverFi Legal Editor

A study by PwC business consulting firm Strategy & found that the world’s largest publicly held companies have been terminating CEOs more frequently for ethical lapses. Globally, the years 2012-2016 saw a 36% increase over 2007-2011 in CEO misconduct-related terminations.

The larger the company, the more likely a CEO would be fired for ethical lapses (from a rate of 7.8% of all dismissals in the largest quartile of market share, to a rate of 3.2% in the smallest, in 2012-2016).

Examples of Ethical Lapses

Ethical lapses don’t necessarily signal that leaders or companies lack integrity as whole, but they do indicate serious and harmful errors in ethical judgment. Examples of ethical lapses include business-related misconduct such as fraud, bribery, insider trading, and environmental disasters involving negligence or recklessness.

They also include personal ethical misconduct, such as inflated résumés and sexual indiscretions. (We’ll zero-in on the economic consequences of personal misconduct in Part II of this series.) [Read more…]

Ethikos Editor’s Weekly Picks: The Ethical Aspects of Business Education Can We Train MBAs to do the Right Thing?

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Examining ethics and compliance issues in business since 1987

The ethical aspects of business education: Can we train MBAs to do the right thing?

By Vinay Dutta for Financial Express
The question is whether present-day business schools are manufacturing managers programmed to make better business decisions or are they trained to view their decisions from an ethical lens as well? Does the course curriculum of business schools highlight doing right things and cultivating the habit of ethical awareness among students? Ethics act as guideposts to students—the future business managers—to make decisions that make good business sense. Ethics, sometimes known as moral philosophy, is an abstract subject and is filled with grey areas. Different people interpret ethics differently, at times in a manner that suits them. In general, ethics addresses questions such as: How shall we conduct ourselves? What’s right and what’s wrong? How can we measure goodness and badness? Are some things always wrong or does it depend on the view or situation? Read more

The start-ups that will help your company avoid becoming the next Uber

By Tracey Lien for the Los Angeles Times
Companies started taking ethics, values and employee engagement more seriously in 2002 after accounting firm Arthur Andersen collapsed because of ethical violations from the Enron scandal, Quinlan said. But it wasn’t until “social media came into its own” that companies realized they couldn’t stop their dirty laundry from going viral online. Read more

Should open access and open data come with open ethics?

By Kalev Leetaru for Forbes
Not a week goes by that my inbox isn’t filled with a small barrage of announcements from publishers, universities, funding agencies and NGOs unveiling the latest open access or open data initiative. It is fantastic to see this newfound enthusiasm for making the final output of the world’s research available for open reading, reuse and replication, but the focus to date has nearly exclusively been on the final outcomes of research, while the initial ethical reviews of just what research should be conducted in the first place remains cloaked in secrecy. Does this mean we should add “open ethics” to our push for “open access” and “open data?” Read more

Seven ways outstanding leaders do things differently

By Lolly Daskal for Inc.
It may feel as though we’re in a crisis of leadership, but if you stop to look around it’s not hard to find examples of CEOs, middle managers, elected officials, public servants, neighborhood watch organizers, team captains and coaches, teachers and countless others who are doing a good job as leaders. Most of us are either in that group or working toward it.

Much rarer are the exceptional leaders whose qualities truly shine, the ones who practice the kind of leadership we all aspire to. Read more

 

 Join SCCE and become part of the compliance profession

Subscribe to ethikos

The most interesting business ethics, culture and leadership articles delivered right to your email every week! Browse selected articles for inspiration, tips and great ideas on how to implement and maintain a healthy business culture. Stay on top of new insights, how-tos, and interviews from around the world—all from the comfort of your desk. Subscribe now.

ethikos is a publication of the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics

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Steps for Effectively Monitoring Researchers’ EMR Accesses

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By Daniel Fabbri, CEO of Maize Analytics,
Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics
and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University

Clinical researchers require access to electronic medical records (EMR) for chart review. However, ensuring that researchers do not overstep and access data not associated with a research study is challenging.

Hospital privacy and compliance officers are responsible for monitoring employee access to the EMR to ensure appropriate use. Auditing employee accesses typically involves determining how an employee is involved with a patient’s treatment, payment or operations. If the officer can determine the employee’s association, the access is likely appropriate. But researchers are inherently not part of care teams and their accesses can appear to be random. Thus, it is extremely difficult to differentiate appropriate versus inappropriate research accesses. [Read more…]

Do You Know Your Incident Reporting Compliance Responsibilities Under NIST 800-171?

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By Rich Selvidge, CISSP, Solutions Architect at Redhawk Network Security

One thing is hard to argue in today’s complex cyber world: cyber incidents are part of doing business. Chances are, your organization’s data will be—or already has been—breached. With an employee clicking on malware every 81 seconds in the U.S., according to a study by Check Point, it’s no surprise that cyber incidents that expose sensitive data are spreading like wildfire. Most organizations focus on mitigation: you remove viruses, launch employee “don’t click” training programs, and try to secure your network from hackers. But what is your organization doing to be ready when the inevitable happens?

Are you prepared to successfully respond to incidents, whether they stem from malware, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, stolen passwords, or lost laptops? It’s one thing to have security efforts in place to protect your data, but it’s another to have incident response planning in place. Incident response is one of the 14 requirements outlined in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-171—Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) in Nonfederal Information Systems and Organizations, and enforced by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). If your organization contracts for the government, you must implement all 14 of these security requirements and controls by December 31, 2017. Simply put, if you do not comply, you risk losing your contracts, costing your organization millions of dollars in lost revenue. [Read more…]

Policies in Conflict: Undermining Corporate Self-Policing

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By Joe Murphy, JD, CCEP, CCEP-I
Compliance Strategists

The Rutgers University Law Review has published, Joseph E. Murphy, Policies in Conflict: Undermining Corporate Self-Policing, 69 Rutgers U.L. Rev. 42 (2017).  This article exposes the realities of how the legal system, instead of actively promoting effective compliance and ethics programs, has in many ways undercut such programs.  It also points out the weaknesses in programs today, due to these undercurrents and the failure of government to take a more consistent and proactive approach. It concludes with a practical solution to balance the competing interests and make clear that effective compliance and ethics programs serve an essential public interest and deserve government’s full support.

I would be interested in any comments on this subject, and thoughts on how to advance the understanding of and support for effective compliance and ethics programs.  I believe these programs, when done well, are vital to protecting the public from the harms that can come from organizational wrongdoing.

Cheers,  Joe

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Employee Classification Compliance

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By Evan Werner, Freelance Writer

Current U.S labor law clarifies and regulates the rights and duties of workers, their employers, and unions. In the past, workers have fought to protect their social and economic rights, improve safety, prevent child labor, discourage discrimination, and to increase their bargaining power in contracts with employers.

For businesses, general labor laws dictate how many hours an employee can work in a week without receiving overtime pay. These laws help prevent overworking and ensure that workers are receiving adequate and fair compensation. When employees work more than 40 hours per week, labor laws states that employers must pay workers overtime.

To determine who must be paid overtime, the federal Fair Labor Standards Act divides workers into two categories: exempt and non-exempt. Exempt workers often receive a salaried pay for managing or supervising other workers. Employers are not obligated to pay exempt workers any overtime. Non-exempt workers often receive an hourly pay and overtime pay if they work more than 40 hours in a week. [Read more…]

Four Winning Ways to Work with the Legal Department

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By Kristy Grant-Hart
KristyGH@SparkCompliance.com

How do you work with the Legal Department? Do you have a good relationship?  If so, why and how?  These are the questions I’ve been asking my compliance friends so I can get the hear straight from the experts – YOU!  I’ve been taking their answers (anonymously of course) and putting them into my presentation at the SCCE Conference in Las Vegas.

As for me?  Following please find four winning ways I’ve found to work with Legal.

  1. Carefully Delineate Your Responsibilities

You’ve just received a notice of a potential competition violation or a data breach.  Who is in charge, Compliance or Legal?  Deciding these types of questions before they become an issue can be incredibly helpful.  In one company in which I worked, if there were a regulatory investigation or outside competition inquiry, then the Legal Department handled it.  If there were an internal competition complaint or concern, Compliance handled it.  This delineation allowed for easy assignment of tasks when an issue came up.

One company I work with separates contract processing as follows:  Legal is primarily in charge of contract drafting, negotiation and review; and Compliance handles any anti-bribery, modern slavery or sanctions-related clauses, as well as any supplier codes of conducts.  Legal relies on approval from Compliance for these specific clauses and supplier code reviews, and Compliance doesn’t interfere with the rest of the contracting process.

Talk to Legal about all of the areas they handle.  If your company’s Compliance Department is new, there may be reluctance by the Legal Department to hand off responsibility.  After all, Legal has almost certainly been entirely in charge of legal and compliance issues before Compliance came to the company.  Try to be understanding but firm in creating delineated responsibilities so that you can work together effectively. [Read more…]