Ethics & Compliance
Topic Center

And they seem to appear out of nowhere. But the risks are real. When ethical violations occur, they can lead to expensive litigation, damage to your reputation, and a hit to your bottom line. Consider these dilemmas:

• An account executive offers a gift to a customer during a site visit
• An employee unwittingly shares confidential information with a competitor
• A distributor offers a bribe to expedite a shipment

Your Compliance Program Needs to Monitor a Wide Range of Elements

But the good news is that the US Sentencing Commission and other regulatory bodies have started you off in the right direction. They’ve developed comprehensive guidelines for implementing a stable and effective Ethics and Compliance Program. We’ve distilled them down into 5 key elements your program needs.

Following these guidelines helps minimize the risk that unethical
conduct poses to your organization. They help you proactively address questions that come up around business integrity, workforce values, and data privacy. When scenarios like receiving improper gifts, or sharing private information through social media come up, your workforce is ready for them.

An effective Code of Conduct serves as a central guide as well as
a reference for users in support of day-to-day decision making.
It’s meant to clarify an organization’s mission, values and principles, tying them directly to standards and expectations of professional conduct. Think of it as a table of contents used to easily find relevant policies, training and other resources related to ethics topics within your organization.

How Compli Helps:

We help you automate the development, distribution, maintenance, and reporting of your Code of Conduct.

Out of the Box Ethics Content

Compli’s Ethics Solution Set starts you off with a core Code of Conduct policy along with training and disclosure forms to help automate your Ethics program

Like any organization-wide initiative, support from the top is mission critical. This starts with establishing a senior-level Compliance Officer with the authority and know how to manage your Ethics Program. The Compliance Officer is your influential and vocal proponent of ethics in the organization, and they must be able to work effectively with those who have ultimate responsibility for workforce ethics – the executive team and Board of Directors.

Additionally, your executive team and Board of Directors should
take an active role in your compliance efforts. They should act as
ethics “champions” both internally to the workforce, and externally
to customers, business partners and investors.

How Compli Helps:

We support your Board and executive team by automating your Ethics Program with initiatives, engaging workforce communication and producing automatic regulatory reporting.

The third element of an effective Ethics Program is training…specifically training that maps back to your Code of Conduct. For your Ethics Program to succeed you must train your managers, employees, and third parties on relevant laws, regulations, internal policies, and prohibited conduct. You can ask your workforce to review all of the policies in the world, but if you don’t reinforce your policies’ messages and recommendations with solid training, it’s impossible to cultivate a culture of ethics within your workforce.

How Compli Helps:

Automating your ethics and compliance activities, communications, trainings, processes, and online access ensures your workforce is consistently demonstrating expected behaviors.

Now, you’ve implemented a Code of Conduct, your training has been rolled out to your workforce, and you have the executive oversight required to ensure your Ethics Program has support from the very top. Next, how do you prove that your program is taken seriously? The answer: Create a closed feedback loop by instituting a whistleblowing and reporting program.

How Compli Helps:

We have partnered with the experts to give you a repeatable and auditable hotline that helps you collect complaints that are then are fed into, responded to, and addressed through your internal response processes.

How do you know your Ethics Program is effective? It is not enough to disseminate your Code of Conduct and training to your workforce and hope they stick. You need systems in place that ensure your program is meeting your awareness and education objectives. A workforce compliance automation platform can track your policy sign-offs and training completions to ensure there are no gaps in your program.

And, of course, what gets measured gets improved. Having access to reports that show the gaps in your program help you quickly drill down into issues. This is particularly useful if you have a diverse workforce; as you can monitor compliance awareness based on location, functional areas and roles – letting you target higher-risk populations within your workforce for remediation.

How Compli Helps:

Get detailed insights on your compliance activities by analyzing your initiatives and regulatory data through Compli’s centralized reporting.