In this episode, I have New Yorker writer and reporter Adam Davidson on his recent article entitled, "Piercing the Veil of Secrecy Shrouding the Trump Deal in the Republic of Georgia”. In this article Davidson looks at some of the business practices of the Trump organization. It is a look the Silk Road Group, a mysterious holding company that set out, several years ago, to build a Trump Tower in the Republic of Georgia. Davidson found it to be a diffuse container holding at least several dozen corporate entities who, legally, at least, were registered in different countries around the world and had uncertain relationships to each other. In light of the recent indictments from Mueller’s office, it makes fascinating reading. Davidson is the author of “Trump’s Worst Deal” one of the most significant articles on the Trump organizations business dealings outside the US.
The 360-degree approach to compliance works with all the stakeholders in a compliance program, even the Document Document Document stakeholders; IE., the regulators. By using innovative techniques, one law firm came up with mechanism to present verifiable evidence to regulators, using the basic techniques of social media in operationalizing compliance as a solution to a difficult compliance issue around, of all things, honey. This example shows how creative thinking by a lawyer, in the field of import compliance, led to the development of a software application, using some of the concepts of social media. Once again demonstrating the maxim that compliance practitioners (and lawyers) are only limited by their imagination, the use of this software tool demonstrates the power of what a 360-degree view can bring to your compliance program.
Gar Hurst, partner at the law firm of Givens and Johnston PLLC in Houston, faced an issue around US anti-dumping laws for honey that originated in China. The US Government applies anti-dumping trade sanctions to goods from a specific list of countries. They do this when a domestic interest group alleges and proves, at least theoretically, that the producers in certain foreign countries are selling their goods into the US market at below fair-market value. By doing this, they are harming the US domestic industry. The dumping duties, which can result from this, can easily be 100, 200, even up to 500% of import duties. To get around the anti-dumping laws, importers would ship Chinese originated honey to Indonesia, Vietnam or some other country and pass it off as originating from one of those locations.
The problem that faced was how to prove the honey did not originate from China. Hurst said, “We were working with a Southeast Asian honey producer. They were in this situation where Customs was essentially treating them as though they were a Chinese producer. We’ve provided them documents. We’ve provided them invoices. We’ve provided them production documents but there was nothing that we could give them documentary that they didn’t believed could be faked. That was the problem, documents on their face are just a form of testimonial evidence. Meaning, somebody somewhere said, this honey is from the Philippines. It’s only as good as the word of the person who wrote it on. We needed something that would get beyond that problem.”
Using awareness around communications through a smart phone, Hurst and his team came up with an idea “that with the explosion of smartphone technology which is in the hands of basically everybody in the United States and soon to be everyone in the world, these devices basically allow a person to take a picture that is geo-tagged and time and date stamped and then upload that picture to a database in the cloud. Effectively, that’s what we did.” As Hurst explained the process which they came up it was amazingly simply, “We basically created an app that resided on Android phone that they could then go around and document the collection of all these various barrels of honey and its processing. Every time they take a picture, it would be time and date stamped with geo-tagging as well. You know when and where a picture of a particular barrel of honey which we would label with some special labels so you could identify it when and where that was taken.” The product they came up with is called CoVouch.
From there the information is uploaded into a secure database that Hurst and his team created in the cloud. His firm then took all the evidence they had documented that the honey originated in Indonesia, not China, and presented it to the US Customs service to show his client had not sourced its honey in China. In version 2.0 Hurst and his development team are creating a searchable database which US Customs can use to make spot checks and other determinations.
Recognizing the level of technical sophistication of honey farmers in Asia, CoVouch is amazingly simply to use. It takes pictures, puts time stamps on them and puts geo-tags that show the location where the picture was taken and with glued or pasted on bar codes, you can trace the shipment of honey throughout its journey. But it does so in a way that tells a story. Hurst said, “you’re telling the story but the provenance, of one imported barrel of honey and how did it get to where it’s at. It’s different. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do and trying to do it in a way that is easy enough so that, as you put it, a fairly, uneducated farmer in Indonesia can do it and a busy Customs agent in the United States can review it.”
Such a software system uses the concepts around social media to make a honey farmer a provider of documents evidence, through photographs, to meet US anti-dumping laws. But I see the application as a much broader tool that could be used by anyone who needs to verify information on delivery, delivery amounts, delivery times and delivery locations. This could be a field hand who is delivering chemicals even West Africa and does not know how to speak English. Hurst pointed to uses around whether something might be eligible for special import or export regulations due to NAFTA, whether restricted trade goods, such as those used in the oilfield industry, worked their way into Iran and even applicability under the Buy American Act around the US content in goods.
For the compliance practitioner, you could use such a tool to not only receive information, and more importantly photographic evidence, but you could also deliver information. But the key is that you are only limited by your imagination. CoVouch could be a tool that you use internally for delivery of information and receipt of information inside your company.
Three Key Takeaways
This month’s podcast series is sponsored by Dun & Bradstreet. Dun & Bradstreet’s compliance solutions provide comprehensive due diligence reporting and analysis to reduce your risk of working with fraudulent companies by accessing a company’s beneficial ownership, reputation risk and more. For more information, go to dnb.com/compliance.
In this episode, Matt Kelly and I take a deep dive into the Justice Department’s Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs, released in February 2017. We consider this document in light of the wide-ranging review by the Justice Department of the various Memos from DAG’s over the past 15 years or so to determine if there should be consolidation or clarification into a new “Rosenstein Memo” or if there should be updates to the US Attorney’s Manual. Will the DOJ simply declare the Evaluation is no longer operative because it came out of the Obama Administration’s Justice Department? We consider the information presented in the Evaluation and how its value works in numerous ways for the compliance practitioner.
For more reading see Matt’s blog post “Future of the Effectiveness Questions”
Looking for one of the top Master Classes in Compliance? Join myself and Jonathan Marks of Marcum LLC at the FCPA Master Class will be held on November 28 and 29, 2017 at the offices of Marcum LLC, 750 3rd Avenue, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10017. A Certificate of Completion will be provided to all who attend in addition to the continuing education credits that each state approves. The cost to attend is $1,495 per person. Breakfast, lunch and refreshments will be provided both days. For registration information, click here.
One of the more difficult things to predict in a merger and acquisition context is how the cultures of the two entities will merge. Further, while many mergers claim to be a ‘merger of equals’ the reality is far different as there is always one corporate winner that continues to exist and one corporate loser that simply ceases to exist. This is true across industries and countries; witness the debacle of DaimlerChrysler and the slow downhill slide of United after its merger with Continental.
In the compliance space this clash of cultures is often seen. One company may have a robust compliance program, with a commitment from top management to have a best practices compliance program. The other company may put profits before compliance. Whichever company comes out the winner in the merger, it can certainly mean not only conflict but if the winning entity is not seen as valuing compliance, it may mean investigations and possibly even violations going forward.
These cultural differences were discussed by Erin Meyer in the Harvard Business Review article “Being the Boss in Brussels, Boston and Beijing”. The author identified four different cultures of leadership. Somewhat surprisingly, they are not segregated by geographic region. The author found that “attitudes toward decision making can range along a continuum from strongly top-down to strongly consensual; attitudes towards authority can range from extremely egalitarian to extremely hierarchical.” The four are: (1) Consensual and egalitarian; (2) Consensual and hierarchical; (3) Top-down and hierarchical; and (4) Top-down and egalitarian.
Consensual and egalitarian
This type of leadership is typically found in Scandinavian countries; Denmark, Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. The author notes, “Consensual decision making sounds like a great idea in principle, but people from fundamentally nonconsensual cultures can find the reality frustratingly time-consuming.” Some of the things you should expect are decisions to take longer, with more meetings and process which requires you, as a Chief Compliance Officer (CCO), to demonstrate patience in the process. As a CCO you will be seen as a facilitator and must “take the time to ensure that the decision you make is the best one possible, because it will be difficult to change later.”
Consensual and hierarchical
This type of leadership is found in Belgium, Germany and Japan; where the groups favor a leader investing more time in winning support of his underlings before coming to a decision. This means that your group will expect you as the leader to be a part of the discussions while being a part of the decision-making process. You should focus on the quality and completeness of information gathered and the soundness of the reasoning process because final decisions are commitments and not “easily altered.” Yet there should be a consensus and you must “invest the time necessary to get each stakeholder on board.”
Top-down and hierarchical
This group has the widest geographic range, including countries as diverse as Brazil, China, France, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and Saudi Arabia. It is incumbent to remember you are the boss and expected to make the decision. The key ingredient is to “Be clear about your expectations. If you want your staff to present three ideas to you before asking your opinion, or to give you input before you decide, tell them. Old habits die hard for all of us, so reinforce—with clarity and specificity—the behavior you are looking for.” Particularly as an American, you must be care as an analogy may be interpreted as a decision.
Top-down and egalitarian
This will be the structure that Americans are most familiar with and it includes countries most like the US: Australia, Canada and United Kingdom. Meyer believes these can be seen as speak up cultures, “no matter what your status is. You might not be asked explicitly to contribute, but demonstrate initiative and self-confidence by making your voice heard. Politely yet clearly provide your viewpoint even when it diverges from what the boss seems to be thinking.” Yet the final point, and this is what drives many other cultures crazy under this type of structure, is that decisions are not typically set in stone, there is a continual feedback loop of information which can affect a change in the decision when warranted so you must remain flexible.
These cultures will impact your compliance program as well, in addition to your role as a leader. Simply think of your hotline and the reluctance of many cultures to ‘speak-up’ or even raise their hand when they see an ethical or compliance issue. You must work with your various cultures within your organization to overcome such reluctance. Understanding this cultural disconnect is important. For many businesses, “the greatest business opportunities lie in the big emerging economies, which include Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and Turkey. In nearly every case, these are cultures where hierarchy and deference to authority are deeply woven into the national psyche.” The management style of pushing decisions down in the “organization does not fit easily into the emerging-market context and often trips up Western companies on their first ventures abroad on the business side and most certainly in the compliance realm”, particularly if there is a different perception of what might be termed ‘ethical’.
Learning how your employees in other countries will approach decision-making and leadership will give you, as the CCO, insight into how they will approach compliance. It will require you to get out into the field to talk with folks. If your company grows organically or through mergers and acquisitions or goes the joint venture route, it will need to understand how your new employees will not only think through issues but how they will relate to instructions from the home office in America.
Three Key Takeaways
This month’s podcast series is sponsored by Dun & Bradstreet. Dun & Bradstreet’s compliance solutions provide comprehensive due diligence reporting and analysis to reduce your risk of working with fraudulent companies by accessing a company’s beneficial ownership, reputation risk and more. For more information, go to dnb.com/compliance.
Next in 360-degrees of communication is the sharing of information, which Bryan Kramer discussed in his book “Shareology: How Sharing is Powering the Human Economy”. It is a study of how, what, where, when and why people and brands share.
The answer comes down to one thing: connection. He found that “People all have the desire to reach out and connect with other people, whether it’s through sharing content and having someone reply back or by sharing other people’s content and helping them out.” Kramer identified six types of people who share:
All of these categories are relevant to a CCO or compliance practitioner in considering the use of social media in a compliance program. They describe not only the reasons to use social media but they can also help you to identify who in your organization might be inclined to use social media and how it can facilitate your compliance program going forward.
The Altruist, Hipster and Careerist speak to how a CCO or compliance practitioner can be seen in getting out the message of compliance throughout your organization. Whichever category you might fall into, it is still about the message or content going forward. There is nothing negative in being one or the other if your message is useful. There is certainly nothing wrong with incorporating a little Hipster into your communication skills. As my daughter often reminds me, Dad you are so uncool that you are retro, but that is cool too. Applying that maxim to your compliance regime, if you can communicate in a manner your workforce sees as interesting or even hip, it may well help incorporation of that message into corporate DNA.
The Boomerang, Connector and Selective categories as good ways to think about how your customer base in compliance (i.e. your employees) might well use social media tools to communicate with the compliance function. The use of social media is certainly a two-way street and every compliance practitioner must be ready to accept those communications back to you. Indeed, some comments by your customer base could be the most important interactions that you have with employees as their comments or questions could lead you to uncovering issues which may have arisen before they become Code of Conduct or compliance violations. More importantly, it could allow you to introduce a proscriptive solution which moves your program beyond even the prevent phase.
A key message is that companies do not write the way they speak, and do not speak the language of their employees. [Even more true for lawyers!] Compliance can be seen as a brand and “brands and the people representing those brands need to change their language. If they focus on the title and the quality of the content, among other things, it’ll resonate more with their audience.”
Sharing is a primary method to communicate and connect. In any far-flung international corporation this is always a challenge, particularly for discipline which can be viewed as home office overhead at best; the Land of No populated by Dr. No at worst. Work to hone your message through social media. Part of this is based on experimenting on what message to send and how to send it. Another aspect was based upon the Wave (of all things); its development and coming to fruition in the early 1980s. It took some time for it to become popular but once it was communicated to enough disparate communications, it took off, literally. “It’s the same thing with social media. On social media, we think something will go viral because the art is beautiful or the science is full of deep analytics, but at the end of the day it really takes time to build the community.”
This means that you will need to work to hone your message but also continue to plug away to send that message out. The Morgan Stanley Declination will always be instructional as one of the stated reasons the Department of Justice (DOJ) did not prosecute the company as they sent out 35 compliance reminders to its workforce, over 7 years. Social media can be used in the same cost effective way, to not only get the message of compliance out but also to receive information and communications back from your customer base, the company employees.
Three Key Takeaways
This month’s podcast series is sponsored by Dun & Bradstreet. Dun & Bradstreet’s compliance solutions provide comprehensive due diligence reporting and analysis to reduce your risk of working with fraudulent companies by accessing a company’s beneficial ownership, reputation risk and more. For more information, go to dnb.com/compliance.
In this episode, I visit Lauren Briggerman and Dawn Murphy-Johnson on the Fall 2017 issue of Executives at Risk. It is newsletter put out by the law firm of Miller & Chevalier, where they both work. Some of this quarter’s highlights which discuss are:
For a copy of Executives at Risk: Key Developments - Fall 2017, click here.
I am a huge fan of using social media in your compliance function. But how can you get your arms around how to structure such a program for their company? In an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, entitled “Finding the Right Role for Social Media in Innovation”, Deborah Roberts and Frank Pillar reviewed companies that were not deriving significant benefit from their customer facing social media efforts. I found their discussion of potential remedies as a useful tool to help CCOs design an internal company wide social media campaign.
After acknowledging that social media focuses on the social aspects of the communication, the most important thing to remember is that communication in social media is two-way; both inbound and outbound. It helps to bring your employee base together in an efficient manner to create an environment conducive to compliance for your organization. It also has the benefit of continued engagement. It is more than putting on training or even a Compliance Week set of initiatives, you can continue the conversation and enthusiasm about compliance going forward throughout the year.
The authors break this down further into three parts that emphasize (1) the need to listen to and learn from user-generated content; (2) the need to engage and facilitate dialogue with employee innovators; and (3) to find an audience of early adopters to create excitement and collect feedback.
Listen First
This is the method the authors suggest of how to generate employee insights into your compliance program “where activities are designed to extend the breadth and depth of how organizations search for innovations” even in the compliance arena. The key is that the compliance function must be listening and listening in a manner which they may not have used previously. You will need to “learn to read the signals from large, diverse, disconnected, and unstructured pools of data generated by users. In addition, they will learn to analyze and convert blog posts, tweets, and user-generated content into valuable insights for new products.”
Compliance professionals will need the skills of both a social scientist and a data scientist. This is because compliance practitioners will need to “assimilate, combine, and utilize data from many different sources” across the globe as compliance practitioners need “to acquire skills in computational techniques to unveil trends and patterns within and between the various data sets.” The overall goal “is to sharpen their business acumen and teach them how to communicate the findings to those involved in [compliance] projects.”
Engage and Facilitate a Discussion
The next step is companies understand is to actively engage and involve employees in the innovation process around compliance. The overall goal is to be more collaborative to allow employees to be more involved in the design process. As a CCO or compliance professional you will learn how to engage, find, and pick the right participants, then develop the right incentives to encourage participation. Creativity is both an input and an output of the process. Managers must also develop skills in relationship building and gain experience in the art of conversation and dialogue, which is a key aspect of any collaboration. Managers must learn how to become better facilitators and community managers.
One of the important factors is to visit with “unconventional users” to help facilitate the creative process. Here social media itself can be a powerful tool, facilitating a two-way communication street to allow the compliance function to hear and even see what business and other types in the field may see and hear. The model of involving employees for in-house innovation has always been useful to help build buy-in and acceptance but the authors also found that more diverse participation in the creation process can provide a richer developed process.
Collect Feedback
Social media facilitates a two-way street of communication. Social media can also afford the compliance function the opportunity to interact more directly with its customer base, the company’s employees, in a manner that is far more engaging than the old command and control approach.
If your goal in the compliance function is to create awareness and publicize your compliance program and initiatives, social media can be a powerful tool for you. This is so paramount it should become a core activity of your compliance function. Using social media tools, your compliance function can not only tell the story of compliance but also communicate expectations and even train. Yet once again it is simply more than a one-way tool as using social media facilitates a two-way communication. Just as employees are more apt to tell you about a concern immediately or soon after they have been trained on that issue; they may well communicate directly with you after having received a social media communication on subjects such as managing of third party relationships.
CCOs and compliance practitioners need to develop a dedicated compliance strategy around social media, in the context of your corporate objectives. It allows you a 360-degree view of compliance, through which you can take the input from your employee base and create a compliance experience that your employees will embrace.
Three Key Takeaways
This month’s podcast series is sponsored by Dun & Bradstreet. Dun & Bradstreet’s compliance solutions provide comprehensive due diligence reporting and analysis to reduce your risk of working with fraudulent companies by accessing a company’s beneficial ownership, reputation risk and more. For more information, go to dnb.com/compliance.
Jay and I return for a wide-ranging discussion on some of the top compliance and ethics related stories, including:
How does one company and one Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) actively use social media to make more effective the company’s compliance culture. The company is the Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) and its CCO, Louis Sapirman, whom I visited with about his company’s integration of social media into compliance.
Sapirman emphasized the tech savvy nature of the company’s work force. It is not simply about having a younger work force. If your company is in the services business it probably means an employee base using technological tools to deliver solutions. He also pointed to the data driven nature of the D&B business so using technological tools to deliver products and solutions is something the company has been doing for quite a while. This use of technological tools led the company to consider how such techniques could be used internally in disciplines which may not have incorporated them into their repertories previously.
Not surprisingly, with most any successful corporate initiative, Sapirman said it began at the top of the organization, literally with the company’s Chief Executive Officer, Robert Carrigan. Sapirman noted that the CEO saw the advantage of using social media internally and challenged many in his organization to take a new look at the way their functions were using social media. From there Sapirman and his team saw the advantages of using social media for facilitating a two-way communication. Sapirman comprehended the possibility for use of social media for compliance with those external to the company as well.
Internally Sapirman pointed to a tool called Chatter, which he uses similarly to those in Twitter engaging in a Tweet-up. He has created an internal company brand in the compliance space, using the moniker #dotherightthing, which trends in the company’s Chatter environment. He also uses this hashtag when he facilitates a Chatter Jam, which is a real-time social media discussion. He puts his compliance team into the event and they hold it at various times during the day so it can be accessed by D&B employees anywhere in the world.
He said that he seeds Chatter Jam so that employees are aware of the expectations and to engage in the discussion respectfully of others. When they began these sessions he also reminded employees that if they had specific or individual concerns they should bring them to Sapirman directly or through the hotline. However, he does not have to make this admonition any more, as everyone seems to understand the ground rules. Now this seeding only relates to the topics that each Chatter Jam begins with going forward.
One of the concerns lawyers tend to have about the use of social media is with general and specific topics coming up on social media and the ill it may cause the organization. Sapirman believes that while such untoward situations can arise, if you make clear the ground rules about such discussions, these types of issues do not usually arise. That has certainly been the D&B experience.
Each employee uses their own names during these Chatter Jams so there is employee accountability and transparency as well. Sapirman said they further define each communication through a hashtag so that it cannot only immediately be defined but also searched in the archives going forward. He provided the examples of specific regulatory issues and privacy. This branding also enhances the process going forward.
I asked Sapirman if he could point to any specific compliance initiatives that arose during or from these Chatter Jams. Sapirman emphasized that these events allow employees the opportunity to express their opinions about the compliance function and what compliance means to them in their organization. One of these discussions was around the company’s Code of Conduct. He said that employees wanted to see the words “Do The Right Thing” as the name of the Code of Conduct.
I inquired about D&B’s use of social media in connection with their third parties. Sapirman said that the company allows some of them access to its internal Chatter tools to facilitate direct communications. Further, these external contractors can connect with both Sapirman and the company through Twitter. He said that he is consistently communicating to the greater body of customers about the compliance initiatives or compliance reminders on what the D&B compliance function is doing and how it is going about doing them. He believes it is an important communications tool to make sure that he and his team are getting their compliance messages out there.
Sapirman also described using Chatter in a manner that sounded almost like Facebook and its new live video function. He said they can deliver short video vignettes about compliance to employees. The compliance function or the employee base can develop these.
All the initiatives Sapirman described drove home to me three key insights. The first is how compliance, like society, is evolving, in many ways ever faster. As more millennials move into the workforce, the more your employee base will have used social media all their lives. Once upon a time, email was a revelatory innovation. Now if you are not communicating, you are falling behind the 8-ball. Employees expect their employers to act like and treat them as if this is the present day, not 1994 or even 2004.
The second is that these tools can go a long way towards enhancing your compliance program going forward. Recall the declination to prosecute that Morgan Stanley received from the Department of Justice, back in 2012, when one of its Managing Directors had engaged in FCPA violations. One of the reasons cited by the DOJ was 35 email compliance reminders sent over 7 years, which served to bolster the annual FCPA training the recalcitrant Managing Director received. You can use your archived social media communications as evidence that you have continually communicated your company’s expectations around compliance. It is equally important that these expectations are documented (Read – Document, Document, and Document).
Finally, never forget the social part of social media. Social media is a two-way communication. Not only are you setting out expectations but also these tools allow you to receive back communications from your employees. The D&B experience around the name change for its Code of Conduct is but one example. You can also see that if you have several concerns expressed it could alert you earlier to begin some detection and move towards prevention in your compliance program.
Three Key Takeaways
This month’s podcast series is sponsored by Dun & Bradstreet. Dun & Bradstreet’s compliance solutions provide comprehensive due diligence reporting and analysis to reduce your risk of working with fraudulent companies by accessing a company’s beneficial ownership, reputation risk and more. For more information, go to dnb.com/compliance.
What is the message of compliance inside of a corporation and how it is distributed? In a compliance program, the largest portion of your consumers/customers are your employees. Social media presents some excellent mechanisms to communicate the message of compliance going forward. Many of the applications that we use in our personal communication are free or available at very low cost. So why not take advantage of them and use those same communication tools in your internal compliance marketing efforts going forward.
On a Social Media Examiner podcast entitled “Social Sharing: How to Inspire Fans to Share Your Stories”, Michael Stelzner, interviewed Simon Mainwaring, author of “We First: How Brands and Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World”, who discussed three key components to successful marketing, (1) Let your employees know what you stand for; (2) Celebrate their efforts; and (3) Give them a tool kit of different ways to participate. I think each of these concepts can play a key role for the compliance practitioner in internally marketing their compliance program.
Let Your Employees Know What You Stand For
In the 2012 FCPA Guidance, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said that the basis of any anti-corruption compliance program is the Code of Conduct as it is “often the foundation upon which an effective compliance program is built. As DOJ has repeatedly noted in its charging documents, the most effective codes are clear, concise, and accessible to all employees and to those conducting business on the company’s behalf.” Catherine Choe, has said that she believes “Two of the primary goals of any Code are first, to document and clarify minimum expectations of acceptable behavior at a company, and second, to encourage employees to speak up when they have questions or witness misconduct.”
But more than the Code of Conduct, does your company really communicate that it stands for compliance? Obviously formal compliance is important but more is required to reinforce that your company has a culture of compliance throughout the organization. In other words, are you communicating what you stand for and not simply the rules and regulations of a compliance program?
Celebrate Their Efforts
The 2012 FCPA Guidance speaks to the need to incentivize employees in the company realm. The Guidance states, “DOJ and SEC recognize that positive incentives can also drive compliant behavior. These incentives can take many Guiding Principles of Enforcement forms such as personnel evaluations and promotions, rewards for improving and developing a company’s compliance program, and rewards for ethics and compliance leadership. Some organizations, for example, have made adherence to compliance a significant metric for management’s bonuses so that compliance becomes an integral part of management’s everyday concern.” But more than simply incentives, it is important to “[M]ake integrity, ethics and compliance part of the promotion, compensation and evaluation processes as well.”
Mainwaring’s concept means going beyond incentivizing. To me his word ‘celebrate’ means a more public display of success. Financial rewards may be given in private, such as a portion of an employee’s discretionary bonus credited to doing business ethically and in compliance. While it is certainly true those employees who are promoted for doing business ethically and in compliance are very visible and are public displays of an effective compliance program. I think that a company can take this concept even further through a celebration to help create, foster and acknowledge the culture of compliance for its day-to-day operations. Bobby Butler, former CCO at Universal Weather and Aviation, Inc., has spoken about how his company celebrated compliance through the event of a corporate Compliance Week celebration. He said that he and his team attended this event and used it as a springboard to internally publicize their compliance program. Their efforts included three separate prongs: they were hosting inter-company events to highlight the company’s compliance program; providing employees with a Brochure highlighting the company’s compliance philosophy and circulating a Booklet which provided information on the company’s compliance hotline and Compliance Department personnel.
Give Your Employees a Tool Kit For Compliance
A key component of any effective compliance program is an internal reporting mechanism. The 2012 FCPA Guidance states, “An effective compliance program should include a mechanism for an organization’s employees and others to report suspected or actual misconduct or violations of the company’s policies on a confidential basis and without fear of retaliation.” The Guidance goes on to also discuss the use of an ombudsman to address employee concerns about compliance and ethics. I do not think that many companies have fully explored the use of an ombudsman but it is certainly one way to help employees with their compliance concerns. Interestingly, in an interview in the Wall Street Journal with Sean McKessy, the initial and now former, Chief of the SEC’s Office of the Whistleblower, said, “companies are generally investing more in internal compliance as a result of our whistleblower program so that if they have an employee who sees something, they’ll feel incentivized to report it internally and not necessarily come to us.”
One tool a compliance practitioner can utilize in the realm of social media is Periscope. It allows you to tell a compliance story in real time, throughout your organization and beyond. They are both live streaming apps that enable you to create a video and open the portal to anyone who wants to use it. Anybody in your Twitter community can click on that link and watch whatever you’re showing on your phone. The big piece is the mobile aspect. It’s as simple as a basic tweet and hitting the “stream” button.
However, there are a wide variety of social media tools available that you can incorporate into your compliance program. Apps like Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram and others may seem like tools that are solely suited to personal use. However, their application is much broader. As with many ideas in the compliance space, a CCO or compliance practitioner is only limited by their imagination. For these apps, they can be most useful when you tell the story of compliance in your company.
Hootsuite did a campaign called “Follow the Sun” using Periscope. They asked their employees showcase what they called #HootsuiteLife. They gave access to different people in every company office around the globe. Throughout the day, it would “Follow the Sun,” and people in different offices would log into the Hootsuite account and walk around and show off their culture, interviewing their friends, etc. They talk about the importance of culture and now they are proving it. The number of inbound applications drastically increased after people got that sneak peek into their company. Think how powerful such a presentation could be for your organization.
There is much to be learned by the CCO and compliance practitioner from the disciplines of marketing and social media. These concepts are useful to companies in getting their sales pitches out and can be of great help to you in collaborating and marketing throughout your company. These are only some of the tools which you can incorporate into your compliance program going forward but also a different way to think about who your customers are and how you are reaching them with your message of doing compliance.
Three Key Takeaways
This month’s podcast series is sponsored by Dun & Bradstreet. Dun & Bradstreet’s compliance solutions provide comprehensive due diligence reporting and analysis to reduce your risk of working with fraudulent companies by accessing a company’s beneficial ownership, reputation risk and more. For more information, go to dnb.com/compliance.
In this episode, I visit Stuart Levine, one of the country’s leaders on effective Boards of Directors. Levine Chairman of the Board and CEO of STUART LEVINE & ASSOCIATES. Mr. Levine has significant board and executive leadership experience across multiple disciplines including financial services, technology and healthcare specializing in strategy, large-scale change management, leadership development, strategic communication, board governance and customer focus.
We focus on Board optimization and try to answer the question of why your Board is not optimized. We consider what is an optimized board and are you serving on one? Levine explains the key factors contributing to an optimized board are boards are a strong culture, focus on ensuring company strategy and succession planning and have engaged directors who are prepared for all meetings. Unfortunately, these four factors aren’t easily achieved and require strong leadership from the CEO and dedication from all the directors.
We consider the recent NACD report communicate on Board culture and how can a Board optimize its culture and collaboration. Explains how tone at the top and a company’s culture truly starts with the Board. Finally, we consider why Boards become operational and look backward instead of focusing on strategy and how to they correct this.
For more on Stuart Levine and his firm, click here.
For more information on Board Optimization see Levine’s article in Forbes.com Why Your Board Isn’t Optimized
Welcome to Day One of 360-degrees of communication in compliance. This month you will learn about techniques that the CCO can use to provide you not only a well-rounded role as a CCO but also facilitate a much more holistic approach to compliance in your organization. Best of all the techniques, discussed are largely available to you at little to no cost. There are things that you can do both in your method of running the CCO positions and innovations that you can bring to the compliance function in your organization.
A 360-degree view of compliance is an effort to incorporate your compliance identity into a holistic approach so that compliance is in touch with and visible to your employees at all times. It is about creating a distinctive brand philosophy of compliance which is centered on your consumers. In other words, the customers of your compliance program; I.E., your employees it helps to anticipate all the aspects of your employees needs around compliance especially when compliance is either perceived as new perceived as something that comes out of the home office or is perceived as the Land of No. It gives you the opportunity to build a new brand image for your compliance program.
Social media is a big part of a 360-degree view so there will be a focus on the use of social media in compliance and how it can facilitate your compliance program through your compliance messaging. I will discuss some specific techniques of social media tactics that have been successfully used by companies. We will consider the culture of compliance and the clash of different cultures that an organization may have, particularly through mergers and acquisitions but also internally, through organic growth and how a 360-degree view can help overcome this. Storytelling and compliance is another mechanism which is facilitated through a 360-degree.
Other issues to be considered include how can a 360-degree view of communication facilitate your role as a leader in your company and in your compliance program? What are the techniques which can provide a holistic approach to your compliance function? What is the two-way street approach wedded to the benefit of 360-degrees of compliance and communication? Communication is much more powerful when it is a two-way street. Such a view also allows you to information from your customer base, once again your employees back up to your compliance program and incorporate that feedback loop directly into your compliance program going forward.
There are several concepts which should be included in your 360-degree view of communications in compliance. Begin with an objective so you identify the purpose of your communication and the target of whom you are going to communicate to. Identify as clearly as you can the purpose and reason to ensure your message is aligned with your objectives. For instance, are you implementing a 360-degree view of communication to educate, inform, change perceptions or build trust and commitment?
Next, who is your audience? To communicate effectively you need to understand your audience. In any corporation, there are multiple audiences who are the key stakeholders in the 360-degree process. How much do they know? Some of the stakeholders include the Board of Directors, senior management, middle management, employee teams, committees, coaches, facilitators, customers, business partners, vendors, sales agents and representative, strategic alliances and business ventures. What are your distribution channels and how do you track your messaging? You should create a comprehensive spreadsheet to track the messages the intended audience and the delivery mechanism. Another key ingredient of the 360-degree approach is feedback. This is a key component of the 360-degree experience and educate each stakeholder on the benefits of feedback from the 360-degree approach.
Finally, you need to evaluate what you have done. You can monitor your communication activities by tracking attendance at the events, website statistics, open rate of emails, downloads of materials, video hits; in other words, the same techniques that your marketing folks would use to determine their messaging’s effectiveness. The objective is to build trust for the 360-degree process by determining if the goal achieved. You can utilize surveys or focus groups to assess the impact on your target audience. By focusing on your customer customers of compliance, I.E. your employees, it allows you to identify gaps and improve the communication process for your compliance program.
Three Key Takeaways
This month’s podcast series is sponsored by Dun & Bradstreet. Dun & Bradstreet’s compliance solutions provide comprehensive due diligence reporting and analysis to reduce your risk of working with fraudulent companies by accessing a company’s beneficial ownership, reputation risk and more. For more information, go to dnb.com/compliance.
In this episode, Matt Kelly and I take a deep dive into the scandal around Harvey Weinstein. We consider it from the compliance perspective, both programatic and for the CCO. We consider the different types of harassment which comes may face claims of from the fallout. We also consider the Board response by The Weinstein Company board and for the claims involving Bill O'Reilly.
For additional reading see Matt Kelly's blog post Fighting Harassment Where it Lives