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Can misconduct investigations be effectively conducted solely through video interviews? Are there unique risks that need to be addressed when a company has a large remote workforce or supply chain? These questions drive to the core of ethics and compliance and represent some of the challenges faced when a company decides to either move to, or expand an already existing remote working environment (RWE) program.

The Ethics & Compliance Considerations in the Remote Work Environment Working Group used the five principles outlined in the Blue Ribbon Panel Report as a framework to explore the impact of remote working on an E&C program.

Both benefits and challenges are identified for each of the five principles, along with best practices being employed by a variety of companies. A tool kit of real-world examples of those practices in action is also provided.

One best practice outcome from deployment of technologies is the more frequent notice and therefore earlier detection of brewing concerns. This technology can be leveraged to obtain general employee cultural feedback, which can overlap or be a leading indicator of compliance and ethics concerns. Partnerships between Vault Platform and Airbnb represent key current innovations in the use of these technologies aimed to reduce anxiety and increase the likelihood that an employee will Speak Up if an issue exists.

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That way of thinking ultimately trickled down to a philosophy that shareholder profit must be achieved at any cost and that businesses – and by extension their employees – have only purely selfish motivations. 

There have always been detractors, but in recent years the tide of social consciousness, in general, has shown signs of shifting in a more socially beneficial direction, signaled by the popularisation of acronyms such as CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), ESG (Environment, Social, and Governance), and D&I (Diversity & Inclusion). Meanwhile, modern economists have written much about the replacement of Friedman’s SHAREholder benefitting approach with a multi-STAKEholder approach that seeks to recognize a corporation’s responsibilities to employees, customers, communities, and the planet as well.  

Yet while the notion that corporations have responsibilities beyond profit has gained widespread acceptance, corporate law, regulatory policy, and business leadership – broadly speaking – has yet to catch up. This has created an uneven playing field that creates risks for companies that want to ‘do the right thing’ and rewards for those that don’t. 

While conduct and compliance are cornerstones of company culture there to protect the business from breaches that incur costly fines and significant reputational damage, the pressure of the pandemic has seen standards slip as companies circumvent their processes to move things along. A true measure of a company’s integrity can be taken from an exercise in observation – where bullying or harassment flourish, you will likely find neglected safety protocols, careless use of protected data, environmentally damaging behavior and incidents of white-collar crime, and vice versa. In short, there’s no smoke without fire. 

All risks are financial risks

2020 should have been a milestone year in terms of sustainability, societal, and governance issues, and in some respects it still was, but when the Covid-19 crisis hit, the world’s attention was diverted. For much of the year, the focus has been on economic recovery and while everyone has been affected by the crisis, the pandemic has been anything but a great leveler. Through its disproportionate impact on certain groups, especially women and people of color, it has in fact drawn more attention to persistent and systemic inequality and injustice on a grand scale. The disadvantages are wide-ranging, from lower pay, and less access to healthcare and benefits, to working in roles more vulnerable to exploitation or with greater exposure to the ‘front lines’ of the pandemic. 

As a result, the pandemic has sharpened the focus of society, governments, and almost all industries on the importance of social and environmental progress. The lesson is that corporate purpose needs to be at the heart of business resiliency and growth in the face of an unpredictable future. Purpose has the power to unify all stakeholders during the recovery process and after the pandemic, to build resilience for the future.

The movement is gathering momentum among private investors. In January, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, began pressuring companies it invests in to disclose their long-term environmental risks. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said in an open letter that the company will end support for fossil fuel investments and redesign its investment approach to put sustainability at its core. 

This shift recognizes that the purpose of a corporation must jointly serve the interest of several stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, employees, local communities, and shareholders. It is a shift that will directly impact business strategy.  Businesses can no longer focus narrowly on short-term profits but instead must pursue strategies that deliver performance across supposedly non-financial dimensions. The argument is that ultimately, all risk is financial risk. 

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Accounting for public sentiment, government and regulator action, and employee activism, it’s clear that doing the bare minimum required to comply with the law is no longer enough as companies are pushed by their employees, governments, and customers to step up and adopt a multi-stakeholder approach that serves social purposes as well as investor demands.

The last few years have seen employees become increasingly vocal about injustices their workplace or employer perpetrated. Those that have not been able to find a voice through existing channels have grown in confidence and simply created their own. A phenomenon that has significant implications and consequences for business.

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If you look at public sentiment, government and regulator action, and employee activism, it’s clear that doing the bare minimum required to comply with the law is no longer enough as companies are pushed by their employees, governments, and customers to step up and adopt a multi-stakeholder approach that serves social purposes as well as investor demands.

A rising trend of the last few years has seen employees become increasingly vocal about injustices perpetrated by their workplace or employer. Those that have not been able to find a voice through existing channels have grown in confidence and simply created their own. A phenomenon that has significant implications and consequences for business.

Download the magazine now

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Set the intention 

From the outset, the aim of the program must be to actively lower the barriers employees face to incident reporting when it comes to misconduct at work.

Go beyond ‘canned compliance’

The deployment of a ‘Speak Up program’ has largely been about checking a compliance box for years. When ‘Speak Up’ programs were first implemented, largely driven by regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley in 2002, the most reasonable method of capturing incident reports from employees was a literal telephone hotline. Since then, technology has moved on in leaps and bounds but not much innovation has been seen as many ethics and compliance leaders had achieved what the regulation stipulated – simply to offer a mechanism employees could use to report their concerns about corruption.

Remove the intermediary 

Trust can’t be outsourced and shouldn’t be outsourced. A company needs to own the trust aspect of its relationship with its people and it does that by removing as many obstructions as possible that sit between the employer and employee and may end up diluting the employee’s voice.

Drive for resolution 

Investigations or cases need to be resolved not managed. We named our ‘case management’ system the Resolution Hub because that’s its purpose. Compliance and ethics professionals are worthy of advanced solutions to help them do their job and that means driving resolution for all cases, anonymous or otherwise.

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