By Stephen M. Paskoff
The chief aim of corporate compliance is to prevent, detect and correct problems before they lead to the stiff penalties the law imposes when the public is harmed, careers are ruined and the impact of illegal acts lingers.
In fact, the Federal Sentencing Guidelines reward firms whose compliance programs take defined steps to find out and fix problems before they cause damage. Newly proposed amendments will provide additional incentives to firms that act aggressively to maintain legal and ethical workplaces.
As I’ve written elsewhere, we would have been better off if we’d been able to stop the practices before they occurred rather than addressing their resulting chaos. Instead, they brought us financial chicanery, systemic disaster, recalls of dangerous pharmaceuticals and automotive products, and oil spewing through the Gulf.
There are laws in place to prevent retaliation. Organizations also devote massive resources to hotlines, compliance training, corporate policies and structures. Yet these efforts have often been less than successful in effectively encouraging individuals to come forward before bad practices turn into outright catastrophes. If they had been successful, retaliation claims would not be on the rise and the whole issue of compliance would be a stagnant rather than growing problem.
Recently, when I was interviewed for a New York Times article on the practical issues that employees face when they bring ethical issues forward, I offered several tips for identifying signals to discover illegal or unethical conduct.
It’s usually easy for us to recognize the obvious signs of a potentially serious violation. What’s really hard is to know what, if anything, to do about it. This is not because of a lack of systems, processes, or policies. Instead, it is the lack of organizational credibility: people usually know where to go to complain but often don’t believe their organization really wants to know about problems.
It doesn’t help that we call these people who step forward and identify issues “whistleblowers.” The word calls to mind a traffic cop blowing a whistle, stopping you from jaywalking.
Over the years, I’ve noticed most people across many industries are reluctant to “blow the whistle” because they don’t want to be labeled as troublemakers. Many believe that they would be better off just focusing on what they can accomplish rather than problems that no one wants to think about, much less fix. Others rightly feel that their organizations would prefer to rid themselves of whistleblowers rather than the problems they uncover.
Organizations that really want to root out problems need to turn around this perception. Fair warning – this is not easy, especially if the organization’s culture includes examples of individuals who were ignored, ostracized or released for speaking up.
Here are five tips to help you create a welcoming environment for people who step forward and speak up about problems.
This excerpt from Simplicity Rules: 12 Thoughts For the 2012 Workplace is published by TLNT with the express permission of Employment Learning Innovations, Inc. [ELI, Inc.]. Simplicity Rules is the copyrighted material of ELI, Inc. All rights reserved. No portions may be extracted, copied or duplicated without the express written permission of an officer of ELI, Inc..