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2017 Compliance & Ethics Institute Session Previews

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By Doug Stupca
SCCE/HCCA Social Media Coordinator

The 2017 Compliance & Ethics Institute is just a month away. With over 100 different sessions to choose from, it can be difficult to decide which sessions and speakers will be the best for you. Luckily several speakers have created previews to their sessions! Here is a small collection of them to help guide you: [Read more…]

Ethikos Editor’s Weekly Pick’s: Creating a Code of Ethics and Conduct

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Examining ethics and compliance issues in business since 1987

Creating a code of ethics and conduct

By Anne R. Harris for National Defense
Companies that sell goods and services to the U.S. government must conduct business with honesty and integrity. To that end, every government contractor should have a written code of business ethics and conduct. Read more

The most important trait in a boss is this

By Marcel Schwantes for Inc.
What’s integrity worth to you? Is it a value you live by in business? Work life? With spouse and kids? Does it define who you are?

Let me up the ante: When you reach the crossroads of choosing between towing the line or taking the higher road and doing the right thing (even when nobody’s looking), what then?

Albert Einstein once said, “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.”Read more

3 steps to protecting your business from workplace fraud

By Ash Noah for The Business Journals
In terms of culture, it’s important for senior executives to lead by example and set a strong tone from the top. Developing an anti-fraud policy and asking employees to sign a code of ethics also sends a message that fraud will not be tolerated, and encourages employees to identify instances where it’s occurring.

Second, it’s critical to implement an internal control system with policies and procedures designed to restrict opportunities and decrease the temptation to commit fraud. Read more

The importance of building ethics into artificial intelligence

By Kriti Sharma for Mashable
A crucial step toward building a secure and thriving AI industry is collectively defining what ethical AI means for people developing the technology – and people using it.

At Sage, we define ethical AI as the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans, built with the ability to autonomously conduct, support or manage business activity across disciplines in a responsible and accountable way. Read more

 

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Don’t Have an Ethical Code of Conduct? Your Organization Needs One

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By Zafar I. Anjum MSc, CFE, Intl. Dip. (Fin. Crime)
Group Chief Executive, CRI Group

Business leaders are usually quick to communicate their expectations to employees, especially when it comes to financial goals or tasks that they want accomplished. However, what is often lacking is a clear, concise explanation of what the organization expects in terms of ethical behavior.

Does your organization have an ethical code of conduct? If not, you might be making assumptions that your employees know to conduct themselves in an ethical manner, when, in fact, this expectation only exists in a gray area in their minds – if at all. In fact, some employees who have engaged in fraud, corruption or other unethical situations have claimed that while they knew their behavior was wrong, they thought it was implicitly accepted by their bosses and, in some cases, their company on the whole. [Read more…]

Ethikos Editor’s Weekly Picks: Are You in it for 5 Years or 50? The Trust You Earn Will Determine How Long Your Business Lasts

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Examining ethics and compliance issues in business since 1987

Are you in it for 5 years or 50? The trust you earn will determine how long your business lasts

By Ray Zinn for Entrepreneur 
You cannot last long in this world without trust. It creates friendships, keeps partners by your side and grows your businesses.

Trust inspires loyalty, and it extends to businesses as well as people. Venerable brands such as Coca-Cola and Nike understand their committed fans would disappear quickly if they believed that trust was being abused. No marriage and no company can survive if the people who depend on them always are worried that the other party won’t deliver on promises. Read more

Why are businesses planting microchips in their employees?

By Rob Waugh for The Telegraph
Embedded technology can put security details and biometric sensors under workers’ skin. How can businesses adopt this ethically?

It looks like something out of science fiction: workers hold their hands up to be scanned and a computer unlocks the door, responding to a microchip the size of a grain of rice embedded in their flesh.

This year, a US vending machine company, Three Square Market, hit the headlines after 50 employees volunteered to be “chipped” to access snacks from machines at work. Meanwhile in Sweden, 75 employees at the Epicenter office space have had microchips implanted subcutaneously, allowing them access to doors and printers in the building. Read more

The most important trait in a boss is this

By Marcel Schwantes for Inc.
What’s integrity worth to you? Is it a value you live by in business? Work life? With spouse and kids? Does it define who you are?

Let me up the ante: When you reach the crossroads of choosing between towing the line or taking the higher road and doing the right thing (even when nobody’s looking), what then?

Albert Einstein once said, “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” Read more

Tech CEO tackles digital ethics and its role in the development of AI & automation

By Alex Radu for Computer Dealer News
As artificial intelligence and automation continues to develop, organizations all over the world are going to have to start thinking about digital ethics.

As a senior leader of Avanade since its conception in 2000, and its CEO since 2008, Adam Warby is specifically equipped to help answer this question. CDN had a chance to sit down with Warby to discuss accruing talent, the remote workforce, digital ethics and automation, and digital transformation. Read more

 

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To Say or Not to Say: Anti-Harassment and Communication in the Workplace

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By Mark Dorosz
VP of Compliance Learning, Interactive Services

“Communication is key” is a phrase we hear repeatedly in and out of the workplace. What we don’t hear about often are the types of communication that exist, and how they shape the environments we use them in. In the workplace you must consider high context and low context styles – it’s a cultural and environmental detail. [Read more…]

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
Join SCCE and become part of the compliance profession

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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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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

 

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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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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…]

Ethikos Editor’s Weekly Picks: ‘My Hands Were Tied”: How Readers Handled Unethical Workplace Requests

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Examining ethics and compliance issues in business since 1987

My hands were tied’: How readers handled unethical workplace requests

By Brianna Milord for The New York Times
After an article providing advice for dealing with workplace ethics dilemmas, The New York Times asked readers to share their stories of times when they were explicitly asked to deceive clients, hide misconduct or engage in behavior that violated their principles.

Here are some of those stories, which have been edited and condensed for clarity and style. Read more

Doing the right thing is just profitable

By Peter Georgescu for Forbes
As a voluntary board member, I got a recent report from JUST Capital that confirmed what I’ve believed all my life: that doing the right thing, in every aspect of business, leads not only to success, but fosters excellence and creates industry leaders. Over the past decade, the most ethical and just American companies have also proven themselves to be the most profitable. They lead their industries over the long term. Read more

When bad things happen, what do you tell your team?

By Ellen de Graffenreid for Inside Higher Ed
Let’s be honest, it is a tough time to be in higher education administration. Questions about higher education’s value proposition, activist legislatures, protesting students, budget cuts, free speech, compliance issues, pressure to ensure access, pressure to ensure quality — all these issues can challenge leadership, complicate decision making and make seemingly straightforward jobs a pressure cooker of political navigation and resource constraints. Read more

Kermit The Frog actor fired over ‘unacceptable business conduct’

By Doreen McCallister for NPR
Nine months after being fired as the longtime voice of Kermit the Frog, Steve Whitmire is speaking out. He was let go in October by Disney for what was described as “unacceptable business conduct.” Read more

 

 Join SCCE and become part of the compliance profession

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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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