Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another Bella Asks episode of the Ethicast. I'm your host, Bill Coffin. Here at Ethisphere, we believe that there is no competition in compliance. And that's why we use this show as a platform to answer high level questions about business integrity that have been posed to us by the members of the Business Ethics Leadership alliance, or bella. Now, BELA is a global ethics and compliance community that provides exclusive access to helpful data, benchmarking events and other resources to advance your E and C program.
It also provides a concierge service by which members can submit questions around best practices and our internal experts will provide an answer plus helpful resources with more information.
Many of these questions are particular to a specific, specific company's needs, but many more of them speak to challenges or opportunities that face ENC professionals everywhere. So in this episode, we're going to answer three such questions as part of our ongoing mission to make the world a better place by advancing business integrity. And joining us once again to answer your questions is Bella chair Erica Salmon Byrne. Erica, it is so good to see you again. Thanks for joining us.
[00:01:16] Speaker C: Oh, absolutely, Bill. It is a pure pleasure to be here. We've got a trifecta of fantastic questions for the audience today.
[00:01:24] Speaker B: We sure do. We sure do. And also joining us today is, you may know her as the host of so many of our fantastic Bella roundtables. But we are also joined today by my partner in crime on the Ethicast, manager of community events, Julia Boys. Julia, thank you so much for joining us. It's great to actually share the screen with you. I'm delighted to have you with us as well.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: Thanks, Bill. It's such an honor to be here.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: Well, in this episode we've got questions about smart glasses, which I, not I'm not wearing, by the way. I do promise that. But we've got a question about smart glasses, AI transcripts and records retention. So let's dive in. Erica, first question comes to us. This is a very timely one.
What should I consider when creating a policy around the use of smart glasses?
[00:02:06] Speaker C: Yeah, so Bill, this was a good enough concierge question that came into us early a little bit earlier this summer that we actually, I actually wrote a piece for the magazine as well on this exact topic. So for those of you who have not had a chance to go read that long form piece, I do encourage you to check it out. But I'll give you the highlights here. So first off, do not write them for a specific piece of technology because this is a field that is evolving. Since we posted that piece, Bill, which was largely driven by the release of the meta glasses and all of the attendant coverage of that technology.
We have seen a leaked video that makes it appear that potentially we're going to get AirPods with cameras in them. So. So I'm sitting in the middle of this screen right now, and I could have Bill's smart glasses recording what we're doing and Julia's AirPods recording what we're doing if I'm not careful. And here's the issue with this technology being much, much harder to spot, much less easy to know that you're being recorded. We're going to have to think carefully about confidential information. We're going to have to think carefully about whether or not we are comfortable with, with people utilizing this technology.
Where is it getting stored? Where is it getting saved? How could I potentially recover it? So take a step back and ask yourself, how have I addressed those questions in my policies and my procedures around transcripts of meetings? Log into a meeting these days. Everybody's got their transcriber on, right? Because God forbid, you know, you actually have to take notes in your own meeting.
Everybody's got their transcriber on.
You should have by now figured out where did those live and how would I recover them if I had to? What do I do about dueling transcripts? How do I think about recordings? Those are questions you need to ask yourself because the amount of documentation that we are dealing with now has just exploded. Smart glasses and soon to be apparently smart EarPods, AirPods, smart pods. I don't know what the branding on these is going to be.
This takes it to a new level because you now have to wonder, not only when I walk into this meeting do I consent to the recording, right? We all get that little notification, but are there other ways that somebody might be creating a record of this particular conversation and am I comfortable with that? And there are going to be places where the answer to that's going to have to be no. Places where you're inter interacting with confidential company information. So think of a deal room or a boardroom, places where you're interacting with a patient and you're dealing with HIPAA information. So walking into a lab, places where you might be able to get your hands on trade secrets. You're walking into a product testing area, you're walking into a factory where they're manufacturing different pieces of different products for different companies.
All of those things are things that your policy language is going to have to take into consideration as we address this new tech.
And you're going to have to think about consent because your employees are going to have feelings about their fellow colleagues wearing this kind of technology.
So it is going to complicate things. And what you want to do right now is you want to think about where are my risk factors, right? So where are the things that I have to think about? Where are the things that I have to be concerned about? And then how am I not only going to write a policy for those things, but how am I also going to tell people that this is something we need to be concerned about? Because there's, there are good use cases for this technology, there's adaptive use cases for it, there's, you know, places where you might need to make an accommodation for somebody to use this kind of technology.
And so you're going to have to have that balance of what, what risks am I averting that this technology is presenting me with and what are the benefits that I need to make sure that I'm balancing? So that's a conversation to have now with your HR team. That's a conversation to have now with your security team, right. If you have physical location, how are, how's your check in procedure going to need to change? If somebody walks in and you think they might be wearing smart glasses or carrying AirPods with cameras in them, those are the kinds of things you're going to have to get out in front of as you go through this process of drafting.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: Now, do you mind if I ask you a follow up question?
[00:06:11] Speaker C: Longtime listeners of Bella asks Bill know, I never mind a follow up question
[00:06:15] Speaker B: and I will always ask, so here goes.
In your long form piece, you had this really, really great observation that creating a policy specific to one kind of technology or even a particular brand or a particular product is a really short route to policy obsolescence. When the, when the product goes away, and you cite the, the advent of Google Glass and how that was. People create policies about that specifically, Google glass lasted maybe 18 months and then took every policy specific to it with it down, down the tubes. So, you know, my question is, you know, you just laid out a really strong case for. You have policy language to address the risks that a particular product can, can pose in a case. When you have something like, like smart glasses where they can produce a number of different overlapping or, or kind of coordinating risks. Even when you have adequate policy language across your whole scope of policies to address each of those risks, is there any vol. Is there any value once you have that policy language in place to then create that additional redundant policy language to kind of unify things around a particular discrete moment in time, like smart glasses are blowing up, everybody's using them. Here's. You know, we're going to use this almost like a policy on policies for one particular use case that you kind of expect to go away. Is there any value in dedicating bandwidth to something like that?
[00:07:29] Speaker C: Yeah, this is a place, Bill, where I would encourage people that are listening to the three of us to think about policies as just one piece of your governance universe. So no one, well, I was going to say no one writes a policy just for policy's sake, but we know that's actually not true.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: Unfortunately.
[00:07:47] Speaker C: Most people do not write a policy just to have a policy. Most people write a policy to have a referable document that you use as part of an employee education campaign. And so that is absolutely going to be the situation right now. You may have a policy that you have drafted around ephemeral messaging, around recording of meetings, around respecting people's privacy and sort of how to handle situations where an employee asks you to turn the recording off. Right. We've all been in those situations where we come into a meeting and somebody says, no, you know what? You, I do not consent to your recording of this meeting.
So you've, you've dealt with all of those issues and really what the smart glasses, you know, all of these, all of this new technology, really what it's doing is it's offering you an opportunity to have a conversation with your employees about preexisting guidance that is current and of the moment. So think about this piece as not needing to create another layer in your policy universe necessarily, but instead being something where you can say to employees, hey, here's some pre existing guidance. This is what this guidance means for this new thing that we have created and we actually just released, or will be releasing rather onto the Bella platform. For all of the Bella members listening to us, a little four part test that we have pulled together. We're using antitrust policies as the test case for this, but a little four part test that we have pulled together to think about your written guidance. And we call it the error test.
And so the four pieces are, is your policy actionable? Right. Could I read this and know what to do with it? Is it insightful? Does the policy actually explain why a behavior is risky as opposed to just prohibited? Is it relevant? So have you thought about kind of who does this policy apply to and is it easy? And so in this case in particular too, ask yourself those exact same Questions, right. Have I taken the policies that I have in place, my records retention policies, my ephemeral messaging policies, all of these things, and have I asked myself those four questions about it? And then have I used this moment in time as an excuse to reach out to my employees and say, hey guys, just a reminder, this is how we think about records creation in this, in this company. This is how we think about protecting confidential information. And in the context of this cool tech, if you are thinking about wearing those glasses into the building, here's what you have to remember.
Indeed.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: Indeed. Well, a great question to start us off. A fantastic answer. Thank you so very much for that. We have more questions to go. So Julia, would you like to take the second one?
[00:10:27] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks, Bill and Erica, I think this next question is really, I don't know, sort of peeling back another layer of that onion of sort of this new technology affecting how programs are operating. And so we received a great question on investigations and how should companies be thinking about the impact of transcripts and recordings on investigations and particularly those auto generated AI transcripts that you mentioned?
[00:10:56] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So this one, this one, Julia, this question's everywhere.
And this question has particularly been everywhere on two fronts. So I'm going to try to answer both sides of this particular coin in my response to this question, if I can.
So the first side of the coin is compliance teams that are being offered the opportunity and in some cases getting a little bit of pressure to utilize artificial intelligence to be more efficient. And one of the things that they have started to look at is can I use AI tooling to turn on a transcript of an interview and use that as part of the supplemental record of the process that I'm going through to look into this issue. There's lots of factors to consider here. Is the interviewee going to be comfortable with you taking a transcript of the meeting or not? Right.
The process of interviewing someone during the course of an internal investigation can be emotionally very fraught. It can be very challenging. There can potentially be privilege issues involved.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: Right.
[00:11:56] Speaker C: There's a whole host of things that are going to govern the way that you think about whether or not it's an appropriate use case for you to turn on transcripts. The other side of the coin is employees utilizing transcripts as part of their evidence of the allegation that they have raised.
And here there are a few things you have to think about. So let's say, hypothetically speaking, the three of us were in a meeting to prep for the Bella asks and I had my transcriber on, and Bill had his transcriber on. And Julia, you had your transcriber on, and somebody said something that Bill didn't like. And so Bill submits a report and he attaches his transcript to the meeting to say, hey, Erica said this thing. I didn't think this thing was okay. And so I'm raising this concern. And here's the transcript of the meeting.
What's your process as an investigator to say, okay, great. Thanks, Bill. Appreciate the transcript. I'm going to now pull Erica's transcript, and I'm going to pull Julia's transcript, and I'm going to see if those three transcripts match, because often they don't. Right. Then I'm going to go talk to Erica and Julia about what happened in that meeting, because one of the things the transcripts don't necessarily do is pick up nuance terribly well. So there are a lot of ways that I can say, sure, Bill. Right? There's sure, Bill, Sure, Bill.
[00:13:15] Speaker A: Sure, Bill.
[00:13:16] Speaker C: Right. Transcript is just saying, sure, Bill. That's what Erica said. No nuance. Right. No context, no nuance. None of those kinds of things.
So where do those transcripts live? Can you recover them easily?
Can you then utilize them in your investigations process?
And here's one thing to really think carefully about.
Are your investigators prepared to, after that interview is finished, go back to Bill who thinks, why are you even doing an investigation? I gave you a stinking transcript to think, to go back and have a conversation, to say, yeah, Bill, but your transcript didn't have the nuance. And when I talked to Erica and Julia, here's what they thought was really happening in that meeting. Right. That's something we have to be ready for, because we are going to have employees that are going to say, what do you mean? It's unsubstantiated? I gave you a transcript.
So there's a lot of things we have to think through with this sudden remarkable explosion in evidence that we are seeing as a result of this technology.
What's your process? You know, which one are you going to rely on?
How are you going to think about whether or not there's, you know, you need to investigate transcripts for signs that those transcripts have been edited.
You know, there's all kinds of things that are going to need to play in. When you think about the documentary, documentary reliance that you can have on some of these different things that employees are going to start increasingly utilizing.
[00:14:47] Speaker A: Thanks, Erica. That's a lot of great things to start considering.
[00:14:52] Speaker C: Yeah, it's A lot to think through, Julia. It's a lot to think through. And so to those Bella members that are out there listening to us, you know, obviously we have a lot of resources on the platform on this topic, but you're going to need to think about how are you training your investigators to ask these questions. You're going to need to think about how are you talking to your IT team about retention periods. You're going to need to think about what this is going to do to your hold process in the event that you think there might be litigation involved. There's a whole host of things that you're going to need to think through as a result of this. And that's just for the things that, you know, people are recording and the transcripts that, you know, exist. So to link this question back to the prior question, if people have, you know, other recording devices that they're utilizing, if they have, I think it's called a raspberry, this little device that sits off, but next to your computer and sort of helps you figure out your workday, you may not know everything that employees are going to potentially be bringing you from an evidence perspective. And so you're really going to need to think through all of those retention pieces and your legal teams, your employee relations teams, and your IT teams are going to be your friend.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: Well, for our third question, Erica, this one gets to something that I know you've talked about this a bunch of times before, and I think this is sort of a question we've expected to get fielded to us and never has, but we finally got it. And it was kind of like, we're glad that the shoe finally dropped on this one. And it's not about the most glamorous of topics, but it's a really, really important one. And the question is, how can I get people excited about records retention?
[00:16:26] Speaker C: Yeah. So, Bill, when all of the transcribe transcription tools and the note takers and the meeting summaries and the zoom records and the all of these things first started to pop up as functionality that everybody was starting to turn on.
I made a comment to you at that point, and I said, T minus six months before somebody asks us about records retention.
And we hit just about. Just about six months, we got the question about records retention. And I mean, look, what is happening right now is very akin to what happened when email first came out, which is just this enormous, enormous explosion in the evidentiary records of our work lives. Yeah, you walk into a meeting.
I was talking to a compliance officer earlier today who mentioned that they had a situation where the transcriber was on, the meeting ended as far as the team was concerned and people stayed on the zoom room and we're just kind of chit chatting about stuff. And it all got captured in the transcript and then got, got emailed as part of the meeting summary to everyone that attended the meeting, even though a bunch of those people had left, right? Like, this is, this is what, this is what we're dealing with now with all of this, these tools. And it's the unintended consequences of the convenience that we have adopted by turning these tools on. And so using stories of situations where you needed a transcript and you couldn't find it, using stories of situations where somebody shared something in a meeting they shouldn't have and you had to go chase down the nine people who's had their transcribers on to make sure that nobody shared any of that information in a direction that it shouldn't have gone in. You have to figure out, you know, all of these things are ways for you to help people understand the unintended consequences of turning on these tools. And, you know, I've been doing a little bit of an informal poll with the companies that I've spoken to and I've asked everybody I've talked to that has their transcriber on. I have asked, where do they live?
Do you know where the transcripts live?
Do you know how long they get kept for?
Have you set those security parameters? What would you need to do if you had to override one of those transcripts, deletion period, so that somebody held on to the transcript?
Just like we had to do with email when it first came out.
You know, that we're, we're, we are going to have to do the same thing with all of this new tooling that is available to us.
And a lot of people have focused on the convenience and not on the governance of those tools. And it's time for the governance side to catch up. So that's how you make records retention exciting, is you tell people scary stories about, let's play about what happens with the records.
But you have to set those governance parameters. You do. You know, it is not enough to just say yes, as long as everybody consents. You can turn on Copilot and you know, it's recording functionality or it's transcription functionality. You have to know where that record goes.
[00:19:35] Speaker B: Well, Erica, thank you so much for sharing your expertise on these questions. As always, your insights go a long way to helping people manage risk and build Value, especially around these tricky pieces of context and nuance and novel risk as they emerge. So once again, thank you so much for being on the show.
[00:19:50] Speaker C: Oh, absolutely, Bill. It's 100% my pleasure. And to all those Bella members that are out there listening to the three of us, you know, if you don't have, if you don't send us your questions, we can't give you our answers. So please do keep those questions coming.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: And Erica, just real quick before we all hop off, you've mentioned our resource center a few times and some of the wonderful resources that are accessible to those in the Bella community.
I was wondering if you could take a couple moments for those watching who maybe are not part of Bella, just to sort of emphasize some of the great opportunities available for those companies in our resource center with our events. Anything that you might want to share there?
[00:20:29] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Julia. You know, I am BELLA Evangelist number one here at, the Sphere. And it's part, part of a big part of the reason for that is I, I, I do feel so strongly that there is no problem that this community is being asked to solve that we have not seen before.
Even this crazy smart glasses, you know, transcript recording world that we live in right now, if you've been around this profession long enough, you start to pattern recognize, you know, having run into some of these same issues before. Ephemeral messaging is one example. Right. We have, we know how to do this. And so compliant. Doing this role inside of a company can often feel like a very lonely place. It can often feel like, you know, you're, you're a two person team, you're a four person team. Maybe you're lucky enough to be a six person team, but when you, when you have the ability to tap into the power of this community as a whole, to ask like, hey, are you seeing this thing where I don't know how to respond to an employee who thinks that I don't even need to do an investigation because they've given me all the proof that I need to fire their man manager. Right? How do you handle that? What do you do about that? Where are you going to go with that?
That is the power of, of, of the Bella community because it is a community that wraps around a solid core of resources and expertise from the at the Sphere team. So you're not just pure benchmarking, you know, against a group of people that you happen to have known for 30 years. You're peer benchmarking with a group of people who have shared the journey. You have been on. But that's backstopped by all of the other work that we have seen over the course of the last two decades, the strong ethics and compliance teams doing. And we have the ability to cross pollinate, pollinate rather those practices across different kinds of industries. And so you're not alone.
So far, we have not seen anything really that new under the sun.
There are only so many ways that people are going to people, as Bill and I are fond of saying, and so tap in to that. Make your job easier. Give yourself the scaffolding to have the impact you need inside your company. We can't be inside your business with you, but we can help you be as prepared as possible for the things that you are going to be looking to face, because we have seen it before. So we use this Bella Asks format to give a little bit of a glimpse into some of the kinds of answers that we have. But I can promise you there's so much more behind the curtain, so come take a look.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: Well, if you have a question that you would like answered on this program, be sure to contact the Bella Concierge Service and we'll get to work on it for you right away.
This has been another Bella Asks episode of the Ethicast. Thank you so much for joining us. We hope you've enjoyed the show. For new episodes of the Ethicast each week, be sure to subscribe to us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And if you haven't already, please follow at the sphere on LinkedIn on to learn more about how we help organizations like yours measure and improve your ethics and compliance program. Together, we can make the world a better place by advancing business integrity. That's all for now, but until next time, remember, strong ethics is good business. See you soon.
