If the Law is the Hammer, What Else is in Your Compliance Toolbox?
Caveni Wong

How Remediating a Roof Leak is Like Responding to a Compliance Breach
Caveni Wong

Training and Policies Are Not Enough to Prevent Unethical Decision-Making
Caveni Wong

Ethics and compliance professionals have long been aware that a policy by itself is useless. A policy is a simple and necessary first step to set the standard, but it’s the sustained efforts to implement and enforce the policy that leads to actual compliance.

A company may draft a policy, house it somewhere that employees can’t easily find, send a mass email announcement, then consider it “implemented.” This approach may be good enough to satisfy external stakeholders by having something to share with clients or auditors, but does nothing to impact behavior in real life. A sustained implementation effort requires time and resources beyond sending the occasional mass email, an investment that budget holders may not be willing to make. However, without such investment, it’s like establishing a destination but not providing the path to get there.

This happens in law as well. For example, in India, despite its Constitution and subsequent laws over many decades prohibiting discrimination, lower caste Indians are still attacked – beaten, killed, stoned – for wearing the wrong shoes, riding a horse, sitting cross-legged, or changing a name on social media, as reported several years ago by the BBC. Perpetrators often walk away scot-free.

In China, despite various agreements and laws since 1979 protecting intellectual property, enforcement has been (deliberately and strategically, some would argue) lax and uneven. Only recently, perhaps because international pressure has mounted and China has developed enough of its own IP to protect, enforcement is seen as improving.

Of course, having a policy or law is better than having nothing. But it’s only the first step if desired behaviors are the goal. Employees shouldn’t be expected to find themselves to the desintation on their own, and ethics & compliance professionals shouldn’t be expected to bushwhack a path. As corporations declare their strong values and ethical standards, they must also commit to the efforts it takes to support those statements.

What is your company doing to align behavior and culture with policy?

Contact Principle Compliance if you wish to improve the effectiveness of your company’s policies.

Updated from post first published on June 20, 2018

Just Because a Policy Exists Doesn’t Mean There Is Compliance
Caveni Wong

Is Your Compliance Training As Effective As a New Year’s Resolution?
Caveni Wong

If Your Company Were a House, the Ethics and Compliance Program Would Be the Roof
Caveni Wong

If you have ever despaired over dull and tedious compliance training, #TheGoodPlace, now in its third season on NBC, should give you some hope. It proves that serious concepts do not have to be presented in dry, boring and complicated ways.

In the show, Eleanor, a horrible person who dies and gets sent to “The Good Place” by mistake, tries to become a better person to avoid being sent to “The Bad Place.” Helping her in her quest is Chidi, an ethics professor who introduces her to moral philosophers to the likes of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Kant.

As Chidi continues to teach ethics and philosophy, the characters inadvertently act out in ways that lead to true learning. For example, early in season one, Eleanor realizes for the first time that her selfishness causes others around her to suffer. Later, she argues self-servingly that under Utilitarianism, the end justifies the means. Season two delivers dialogue gems such as “I have to keep lying; I’m in too deep,” and “Moral strength is defined by how we behave in times of stress,” – lines that are no stranger to ethics and compliance professionals.

As the show progresses, perhaps the most powerful reminder is that knowing what one should do does not always lead to what one would do. Which means, making sure that employees know what’s right from wrong is a good first step; but making sure that they act ethically in the face of “very concrete sacrifice,” as stated eloquently in an NPR article, is the hardest but ultimate goal to achieve.

So, if you need inspiration to take your #ComplianceTraining or #ComplianceProgram to a better place, schedule The Good Place as your next binge session on Netflix. (Don’t worry, I haven’t given any spoilers away.)

The Good Place for Ethics and Compliance Training
Caveni Wong

What does an illegal football tackle in Japan have to do with ethical decision making? More than you’d think, as it turned out.

In a news conference as reported in a NY Times article, the offending player claimed that he was told by his coaches to “crush” the quarterback, with the goal of causing injury. He apologized for being “too weak” and not being “strong enough to say no” to the coaches’ order.

Lest you think that this only happened in Japan because of the cultural norm to obey authority, recall the central tenet of the movie A Few Good Men, in which two U.S. Marines followed orders against their moral judgment and led to the death of a fellow Marine.

In fact, following orders even when it goes against one’s moral judgment is so common that social psychologists gave it a name: displacement of responsibility. By blaming an authority figure, one can excuse him/herself from taking responsibility for the unethical conduct. It is one of many ways with which we practice moral disengagement – the act of distancing ourselves from the unethical conduct that we commit.

Moral disengagement is practiced throughout history in misdeeds and atrocities around the world, including the Holocaust. Below is a list of the many methods:

• Moral justification: the ends justify the means
• Euphemistic labeling: “borrowing” not “stealing”
• Advantageous comparison: someone else behaved much worse than I did
• Distortion of consequences: no one would even notice it; I don’t even know the victims
• Dehumanization of victims: those people are animals, they aren’t like us
• Displacement of responsibility: my manager made me do it
• Diffusion of responsibility: everyone does it
• Blaming the victim: they asked for it

The real danger of moral disengagement is that the perpetrator is not often aware that the action is unethical. Multiply that by whole teams, divisions, and management ranks, and a company could have a huge problem. Just Google “biggest corporate scandals” and you’ll find plenty of examples in which the companies’ misdeeds are enabled by tens, hundreds or even thousands of their own employees.

For a company to have an ethical culture, employees must not only know what the ethical standards are, they must also fend off temptations to morally disengage. This doesn’t happen magically. An ethical culture requires deliberate efforts to achieve. These efforts don’t have to be costly or complicated; they just need to be genuine and persistent.

Do you have any personal examples of moral disengagement?

Contact Principle Compliance to learn how we can help enhance your company’s ethical culture.

“My Manager Made Me Do It” and Other Excuses
Caveni Wong

By Caveni Wong, Founder and Principal

Yesterday morning I woke up to a cryptic email from the owner of a local business which said:

“As you may know, the media has published and aired articles concerning allegations against me.  I vehemently deny the allegations…”

Curious, I Googled the story and discovered that the owner had been accused of sexual harassment by two former employees who claimed that they had been groped and touched without consent, as well as subjected to a “barrage” of crude and sexual comments. Both claimed to have been fired after complaining about the behavior.

The thoughts that ran through my mind were:

1. Small businesses are just as much at risk of unethical/unlawful behavior as large companies. Even if they don’t often make headline news, the experience is still traumatizing for all involved.
2. Barring the possibility that he is outright lying, there is a chance that this owner genuinely doesn’t believe that his behavior, if proven, was wrong.
3. Leaving the burden of proof to the lawyers involved in the case, my mind turned to “how do we prevent yet another case like this?”

There’s no quick fix, but even small companies should start by establishing written standards of behavior that leave little room for interpretation. In the case of sexual harassment, this means more than claiming “we do not tolerate sexual harassment.” It means clearly defining what sexual harassment is and highlighting examples that are relevant to the company. The written standards do not have to be lengthy or elaborate, but should be prescriptive enough to address acceptable behaviors that is expected of employees and owners alike.

As in larger companies, these standards should be communicated, understood, and agreed to by all employees from day one. The company should remind employees regularly of these standards and enforce them consistently if transgressions occur. If the perpetrator happens to be the owner, you can then take a copy of the standards to outside resources to help your case.

What happens if the owner or management of the small company is not interested in establishing such standards? I have no perfect answer as situations differ. If it were me, I’d tackle it myself, get other employees behind me on the effort, then present a draft to the owner/management for review and adoption. Even for someone unfamiliar with ethics and compliance practices, there are tons of resources on the Internet and from one’s social network that can help jumpstart the effort.

There’s no stopping someone who deliberately misbehaves and considers him/herself above the law. But having the right standards could deter misconduct by those who were unclear about acceptable behavior, and make it more difficult for perpetrators to deny that their conduct was wrong.

Email us to learn how Principle Compliance can help your company develop a set of standards that sticks.

Even Small Companies Should Have a Code of Conduct
Caveni Wong

By Caveni Wong, Founder and Principal

On the evening of International Women’s Day, my husband and I watched Thor: Ragnarok. I was quickly dismayed when an early scene showed two young women screaming and running after the severed head of a monster splattered them with green goo.

“It’s going to be another movie where women’s roles are relegated to screams and gruesome deaths,” I thought with resignation.

I was wrong. Soon, the movie’s chief villain appeared, played by the indomitable Cate Blanchett, whose deliciously evil role desired nothing less than ruling the world by terror. Thor, powerful that he was, was saved by an alcoholic but skillful warrior played by Tessa Thompson.

These casting decisions were significant in several ways: that women could be cast in a superhero movie as tough fighters with significant screen time and ambitions, that they could be flawed and even villainous, and that they could be over 25 years of age.

The next night, we saw Black Panther – a blockbuster with a predominately black cast that shattered all kinds of box-office records and that serves as further irrefutable evidence that diversity sells, as reported by Forbes. Just as encouraging were the substantial roles that women played, from the loyal general and her fearless fighters to the tech-savvy sister and the courageous love interest.

A culture of equality cannot be achieved overnight. But given the power that Hollywood wields in shaping our culture, I’m encouraged that it is nudging our culture in the right direction.

Which made my earlier experience on International Women’s Day a bit more palatable.

I had attended a conference for women entrepreneurs where several men were also in attendance. During a session in which recruiting was discussed, a man commented:

“Before I hire someone, I want to meet their wives. I ask the wives if they like to shop. If the wives say ‘yes,’ I’d know that they would want to make a lot of money and they’d be good hires.”

There were so many things wrong with that statement – at a women’s conference no less – that I won’t go into here. But I was comforted to know that others at my table were similarly aghast.

I sincerely hope that with the work that we do as ethics and compliance professionals, along with HR, and a bit of razzle-dazzle from Hollywood, comments like this would be the last of its kind. Share this post with others if you agree.

Principle Compliance can help companies bridge the gap between stated values and reality. Contact me if you’d like to start a discussion.

Gender Equality and Diversity: Thor and Black Panther Got It Right but Real Life Did Not
Caveni Wong