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.
- It’s all about CULTURE, CULTURE, CULTURE!