[00:00:00] Speaker A: You've got questions, we've got answers. I'm Julia Boyes and this is BELA Asks.
The Business Ethics Leadership alliance, or BELA, as we like to call it, is a community of organizations committed to maturing their ethics and compliance programs and strengthening their speak up cultures.
They do this through roundtables, resources sharing best practices and more. And whereas we believe that every organization can benefit from being a BELA member, we believe that there is no competition in compliance and we are not interested in gatekeeping best practices.
With that, we developed Bella Asks, an Ethicast podcast in which we can take time to answer BELA members most pressing questions.
Today we're thankful to be joined by Erica Salmon Byrne, Ethisphere's Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Chair of BELA. Welcome, Erika.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: Well Julia, thank you so much for having me back. I'm looking forward to today's question.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Yes, and today we got a great one that I feel like is very pertinent to everyone today as we sort of are midway through Q1.
Today's question is: in addition to training and manager policy education, what approaches are companies using to address areas with a significant number of concerns or employee concerns of a specific type? And they gave examples of discrimination or harassment.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Yep, absolutely. So Julia, the reason I like this question, and as you, you know from the little bit of back and forth that we had going into today's episode about which question we wanted to answer, one of the things I like about this question is it indicates to me that this is an organization that's trying to get proactive about addressing this area of employee concern. So they've noticed a trend and they've thought about, okay, well we could do additional training on this, we could do additional communications on this. What else could we do? What other companies doing to address the fact that we're seeing this particular trend in our data or you know, data of whatever it is, investigations data, speak up data, whatever the case may be.
And so a couple of thoughts. One is for sure, look at the things you are doing that are not just what I will call push communications. And what I mean by push communications is like we are the ethics and compliance team. We will write a newsletter. We will put the newsletter in the on the SharePoint site. Everyone will engage with it and it'll fix the issue. So, so think about what are the other potential touch points that you have with your organization that you could potentially use to get some of this information out there? Could you put a toolkit in the hands of managers? Do you have an ambassador or liaison program where you could put tools in the hands of the ambassadors. Is there some other company system you could utilize to get information into the hands of your employees? Whatever might be available to you that would go beyond what I would call the traditional avenues of information dissemination. Those would be the things I would look at. I would also look for other data sources that would give you a sense as to whether or not this trend that you're currently seeing is something that is supported in other data polls. So, you know, let's say, hypothetically speaking, you're seeing a rise in concern about discrimination or harassment in a particular part of your business.
What is HR seeing?
Do you have new managers in this particular part of the business? That might explain some of the trend line that you're seeing. Where is this trend line coming from? Is it coming in via your investigation statistics or is it something that you're seeing in questions that are coming in from employees? Are people engaging with a policy more than they otherwise might have been recently? Right. And that could be a piece of what's driving some of this trend. So really thinking very strategically about what are the other sources of information that are available to me as a compliance team, that would give me a sense as to the magnitude and durability of this particular trend. So those are just a couple of ideas that I have that is so helpful.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: Could I ask you a quick follow up question?
[00:04:09] Speaker B: Of course.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: From your point of view, when you think about the different types of employees at an organization, you know, people who are at corporate, people who maybe be, are non desked, do you feel like how should a company look at those types of trends if their employees are kind of spread out?
[00:04:28] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a, it's a really important piece of the puzzle when you think about what your response is going to be to any trend that you're seeing. And so in this particular case, the question came in around asking sort of how do I go beyond training and communications? But this should be the kind of thing that you ask yourself with everything you're doing as a compliance team. Who is the audience I'm trying to reach with this particular piece of information and what are their circumstances going to require me to do differently based upon the, the issue that I'm, I'm, I'm dealing with. So for example, we have one Bella member who has gotten very into short podcasts for, as part of their communication strategy.
And they do it in large part because they have a very large manufacturing employee base. And this is a communication modality that works for people who are not sitting at their desks. They don't try to, they don't record them the way we do. Right. With the YouTube links. These are audio only exercises where they're just engaging with leaders to tell stories. And it is one of the ways that they've been able to really disseminate key messages to a non dest employee because it's something they can listen to without having to be sitting at a computer. One of the challenges that we have, we see a lot of organizations face when it comes to things like training or communications is if I don't have you captive on your screen, how do I get information in your hands? And so these little short form podcasts are things that people can listen to on their phone, they can play in elevators, they can play in break rooms, things along those lines. So really think about what are the places where these particular employees are going to be and how do you meet them effectively in that particular moment? It's going to be a really important piece of the puzzle.
[00:06:15] Speaker A: Oh, Erica, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us today and for tackling the question.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: Julia, it's 100% my pleasure. As every BELA member out there knows, we are thrilled to answer these questions on behalf of the community and I'm delighted when we get good ones that we can take to this Bella Asks format so that we can share them with all of you.
[00:06:34] Speaker A: Thanks, Erica. Talk to you soon.
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