Compliance in the Crosshairs

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Compliance in the Crosshairs

This is a guest post by Ramsey Kazem, East Coast Vice President at Spark Compliance Consulting. He can be reached at rkazem@sparkcompliance.com.

The year 2020 has been a year like no other. A year that was expected to be one of economic growth and prosperity suddenly and without warning came to a screeching halt due to a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic. The economy shut down, people were laid-off or furloughed, and a once-promising business outlook turned grim and uncertain.

Companies across all industries have endured the hardships of this new and unforeseen reality. They are confronted with many new challenges. In particular, companies are struggling with how best to absorb declining revenues and lost business opportunities. For many, this means implementing cost-saving measures across the business.

Deciding which budgets to cut and by how much is not an easy task. Companies have competing factions within their organization and each will advocate for an “anywhere but my department” approach to cost-cutting. Some companies will implement across-the-board budget cuts where each department will be asked to cut the same percentage from their respective budgets. Others will target so-called cost centers (i.e. departments within a company that incur costs but do not directly generate revenue) for its cost-cutting measures. Regardless of the approach, the Compliance budget will be squarely in the crosshairs. As such, Compliance must be prepared to speak up and advocate against any proposed cuts to its budget.

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish?

If your company is considering cutting the compliance budget, try to get it to see the long-term implications of such short-term savings. Develop a cost/benefit analysis to demonstrate that a reduction in resources is not justified by the current circumstances. Use the following points to develop your analysis in opposition to the proposed cuts in the budget….

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The Do’s and Don’ts DIY Ethics and Culture Surveys

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The Do’s and Don’ts DIY Ethics and Culture Surveys

Ethics and culture surveys are fantastic. They can give you a gauge on how people within the company actually see ethics and compliance in their day-to-day experience on the job. They can also give you a benchmark from which you can chart how responses change over time, such that you can track trends in the culture of the business.

Many companies use outside service providers to perform these types of surveys. Outside service providers deliver more than just the results - they often give context to the results by providing benchmarked data about how your company’s survey compares with other similarly-situated companies. However, these providers can be expensive. In a time when many companies are cutting back, this kind of activity may be on the chopping block. For other companies, especially smaller ones, this type of survey was never in the budget.

If you can’t get the budget to have an outside service provider perform an ethics and culture survey, all hope is not lost. You can DIY your survey. Here are some Do’s and Don’ts to ensure you have a successful ethics and compliance/culture survey.

Do use Branching Logic if You Can

The best questions on an ethics and compliance/culture survey have branching logic. They allow you to follow a pathway – essentially to ask follow-up questions – if a person answers one way. For instance, if you ask, “Have you ever observed misconduct at the company?” and the person answers “Yes,” the branching questions should continue as follows:

· Did you report the misconduct? (Yes/No)

o If not, why not?

Sample questions are included at the end of this post to give you a head start on drafting your questions.

Don’t Use Negatives or Double-Negatives…

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How to Completely Master Compliance

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How to Completely Master Compliance

Everyone admires masters. Bach, Beethoven, Beyoncé. We view in wonder when some people seem to effortlessly display their genius. Mastery at this level seems to be binary: you’re born with it or you aren’t. Michelangelo didn’t agree with this line of thinking. He said, “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.”

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell reports that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become a master at a task. How much work is 10,000 hours? Roughly five years of 40-hour workweeks. But do any of us feel like “masters” of the compliance profession? No one I’ve met asserts that they have mastered the compliance world. This makes sense because compliance changes daily. Mastery is, therefore, an elusive and ever-shifting goal. Prosecutors deliver new guidance, new regulations surface, follow-on regulations are written, and new enforcement actions continually update what is considered a best practice.

When being a master feels unattainable, it’s easy to give up. But what if the answer isn’t to give up, but instead to change our understanding of mastery itself?

A New Way to View Mastery…

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Masks, New Rules, and Health Mandates: Communicating for Compliance

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Masks, New Rules, and Health Mandates: Communicating for Compliance

Employers have a special responsibility to protect both their employees and customers during the pandemic, but communicating the new compliance obligations to the business - and then enforcing them - can be hard. Despite this, carefully considered communication about the new rules can significantly increase both goodwill and compliance with the new regimes. Here are four ways to do it.

Tie the New Rules to Corporate Values

Most larger companies have created a corporate values statement. Values tend to be similar across all industries. They usually include some variation of “integrity,” “ethical behavior,” and “respect.” When you roll out the new rules (or reinforce them if they have already been released), be sure to tie the rules to living your corporate values, instead of simply issuing mandates.

For instance, if you have a mask requirement, communicate that the company has instated it because it is committed to living its value of respect. Note that the mask mandate has been instituted to embody respecting “our fellow employees and each of the customers, without whom we wouldn’t be in business.” Focus on the needs of both the employees and the customers, not just one or the other.

Consider tying personal responsibility to live the corporate values to the new initiatives. You can say that the company appreciates the integrity of all of its staff, and by protecting ourselves and each other, we collectively live the value of integrity.

Give Real Life Examples

Two of the companies we work at in Spark Compliance Consulting have asked for volunteers to share their stories of vulnerability to COVID. In both cases, they found…

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