Ethics & Compliance – What the Heck Are We Doing!?!?

In this episode of Creativity and Compliance, Ronnie goes off on a rant about how ethics & compliance focuses on the wrong things.

The vast majority of E&C spending goes towards things that don’t actually solve the problem.
Most time and resources are spent on policies & procedures, standards & controls, monitoring & auditing, investigations and measurement. All important, but mostly don’t impact behaviors. Its about CYA.
Most training focuses on pushing policies and tracking that employees passed a test. It’s typically done so poorly that it negatively impacts behavior because they think you don’t care.
The goal should be to prevent employees from doing bad things or helping employees to do the right thing. This means we should be focusing on things that affect behavior.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

The main influences on behavior are the social environment and leadership environment.
To impact the social environment:
- Promote the support system of people, policies and resources.
- Increase frequency of these promotions in short, bite-sized increments.
- Make sure these communications and burst learnings are interesting and entertaining so you can get more airtime and exposure and avoid message fatigue.
To impact the leadership environment:
- Train leaders more frequently about their additional responsibilities.
- Pre-package short trainings and discussions that help leaders deliver this information on your behalf.
We need to create a psychologically safe environment so that the employees feel supported. If they feel supported and trust in a sense of organizational justice, they are more likely to speak up to ask questions and report problems when they occur.
Let’s try and actually solve the problem and spend our time and resources on the things that impact behaviors.