Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, everyone. You've got questions and we've got answers. Welcome to another Bella Asks episode of the Ethicast.
Here at Ethisphere, we believe there is no competition in compliance. That's why we're using this show as a platform to answer high level questions about business integrity that that have been posed to us by members of the Business Ethics Leadership alliance, or bela.
BELA is a global ethics and compliance community that provides exclusive access to helpful data, benchmarking events and other resources to advance your ENC 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 company's needs, but many more of them speak to challenges or opportunities facing ENC professionals everywhere. So in this episode, we're going to answer one such question as part of our ongoing mission to make the world a better place by advancing business integrity.
And joining us once again to answer those questions is Bella chair Erica Salmon Byrne. Erica, thank you so much for joining us on the program. Once again. It's a delight to see you.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: Oh, Bill, it is a, you know, really my pleasure to be here. I think one of the most special things about the hundreds and hundreds of concierge requests that we get on a regular basis is the ability to answer them in this context because not everyone has easy access to the experts here at, at the sphere. And let's bring our expertise out to as many people as we can.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: I could not agree with you more. And this next question we have is a really good one. It's a Champions programs question and it reads, do companies typically allow any employee to participate in their Champions program or are certain groups excluded?
[00:01:54] Speaker B: Yeah, Bill, this is a great question and we got this question in from a Bella member that is looking to expand an existing Champions program to include their, in this particular organization's case, their customer service agents. So these are people who are on the floor, on the phone with very specific metrics that they are looking to hold themselves accountable to. And understandably, their leaders are saying, saying, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't know that I want my people spending any time at all doing any of this stuff because what they're supposed to be doing is answering calls.
And you know, as an example of, of the ways that we support Bella, I actually spent about a half an hour on the phone with this particular Bella member talking about why it would be a really good idea for the people on, you know, in this particular function to be a part of this particular program. So I'm going to give a little bit of the context that I gave to that particular Bella member. If we take a step back. The point of a Champions program is to expand the reach of the ethics and compliance team and get answers in the hands of people in the business from people in the business. So, you know, it's one thing for me to pick up the phone and call my ethics and compliance team and say, hey, what do I do in this situation? It's a little daunting, right? Depending upon the circumstances you find yourself in, depending upon the circumstances of the question that you might have, it can be kind of nerve wracking for you to go to the time, trouble, effort and energy to raise your hand in that way.
So maybe you go to your manager. Again, great. Resource managers are often available to answer these questions. But again, sometimes, depending upon the circumstances, it can feel a little, you know, not super comfortable to bring this particular whatever it is that you might need help with up to your manager. And so that's where your champions come in, right? These are people who are in the business, they're doing the job with you, but they serve as a conduit to get your questions answered.
Why on earth would you not want people like that in your frontline operations like customer service? If I am answering the phone and I'm talking to customers, the things that I need to be aware of, the questions I need to have answered, I need those answers quick. I need those answers at my fingertips. And if I need to talk to someone to get help, why wouldn't I want to have that at the ready at all times?
So the challenge for this particular Bella member, and the challenge for someone who's listening in, thinking about expanding their Champions program to really any environment where you have someone who's held to very specific, minute by minute or quarterly, you know, 15 minute increment type metrics, is you've got to tailor the program to the risks that that particular function is facing. And you have to convince leaders about it in a way that is not, hey, this is good for the ethics and compliance program, or hey, this is good for the development of your people. Because the response to that is very understandably, understandably, rather going to be, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that. But I got these, these things over here. My KPIs, right. I have a moving dashboard of how many calls my people are supposed to be on and I need to make sure that they're answering the phone.
So you've got to make it about how do you mitigate risk in a way that protects the leader of that business unit and the company?
So this is where storytelling comes in. If you have a situation where you had something happen with a customer service agent, you had something happen with a competitor's customer service agent, right? Whatever your function, specific function you're trying to expand this program into is think about what that looked like. What is that fact pattern, and could a champion have prevented that from happening?
Because if you can make that case, if you can, you know, sort of draw that through line for that leader, it's going to be a lot harder for that leader to say, no, no, no, I don't want them to spend the time. The second thing is, you have to be willing to tailor your program.
It is very tempting, you know, with a lot of the things that our audience deals with, training, communications, whatever it is, to just peanut butter it because you don't want to miss anybody.
You have to be willing to look at your Champions program, which you might have designed for an office environment, and say, what are the, you know, how do I pull pieces out of this to make it work for an IT group, a customer service team, someone on the manufacturing floor, Right. Whatever the particular audience that you're rolling this program out to might look like, how do I make it as applicable as possible to that particular part of my business? Because that is how you're going to capture the attention of, of the leaders of that group. You can say, look, we are going to roll this Champions program out. We're going to give them four topics, you know, a year. Those four topics are going to be very specific to your particular part of the business. They're going to be about customer fraud. They're going to be about inappropriate access to personal information. Right? Whatever the risks are that this group presents you with, make your program about that for that leader and then make your program about something else for your finance leader and something else for a different leader and something else for your region in Algeria. Right? Whatever the case may be, the more you can tailor it, the harder it's going to be for your leaders to say no.
So don't make them intuit the through line. Don't make it pie in the sky about developing your people, even though we all know that's really important because it's too easy to say that's a priority for a different time.
And we're not going to do this. Maybe, maybe, maybe in Q2, maybe in 2027. Right? You don't want to get that. Maybe you want to make it practical, proactive, pragmatic and preventive.
And if you can do that and you can tell that story, you're much more likely to get those leaders across the board.
[00:07:35] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, look, this is normally the point of the story where I would say, eric, I can ask you a follow up question and then you would say, no, you know what my answer that is going to be.
[00:07:42] Speaker B: But.
[00:07:43] Speaker A: But this time it's a little bit different. This is not exactly a follow up question. This is a second concierge request. We got that Lego blocks perfectly into this one. So this is kind of a second question I have for you to follow on to what you were just talking about. And this is a little bit more high level. But can you talk about what are good goals to set for a Champions program?
[00:08:03] Speaker B: I'm really happy that this is a follow on question, Bill, because we should all be thinking, particularly as we move into the end of the year, we're thinking about our 20, 26 initiatives, we're thinking about our programmatic activities. We should be thinking about how do we know if our Ambassador program or our Champions program or our Integrity Liaison program, whatever you call it, it's the same idea. How do I know it's working? Right? What are the things that I'm going to be looking for that are going to tell me that this is doing what it's supposed to do? And so I have two suggestions, and one of them falls in the bucket of activity metrics, and one of them falls in the bucket of performance metrics. So an activity metric is something that is purely just, am I seeing the thing I think I should be seeing? So, you know, am I getting questions that are going into my ethics liaisons?
Do I see an uptick in people raising their hand? Whatever the, the thing you've asked your Champions to do, what is the output you would expect to see from that thing so that you then know whether or not it's working? So let's say, hypothetically speaking, you are going to really use your Champions. When you roll out your conflicts of interest disclosure process, you should see on a region by region basis, an uptick in the number of disclosures that you're getting because of the efforts of the Champions. And if you don't see it in particular regions, you should ask yourself why. Right? Is there something about that population that makes them less likely to have conflicts in the first place, or are they just not disclosing them? Right. Those. So, so design your Champion program with what it is that you want to see on the other side of that rollout, that would be a good activity metric.
The second metric bucket is a performance metric. And so that is really about the effectiveness of what it is that you're doing. Are those conflicts of interest disclosures of a better quality? So activity metric is volume, Performance metric is quality. Am I getting the right kind of disclosures? Are they happening from the right people? Do I get a sense that we are more effectively mitigating some of those conflicts? We. Whatever the, the, the thing your Champions are focused on for that particular quarter, for that particular half a year, for that particular year, what are the things that I should expect to see are better as a result of the work that the Champions are doing?
Now, if your Champions program is engaging in activities that you can't tie either an activity metric or a performance metric to, go back to the drawing board and ask yourself whether or not you're using your Champions effectively, because you should be able to identify both of those things for that program. And if you can't, then what you have is a really nice, fluffy thing that people can talk about doing that isn't actually going to expand the reach or the impact of your program.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: This has been such a great conversation and I love getting these questions because I've had the opportunity to interview folks worldwide, ethical companies, honorees, and just ethics compliance professionals who either they got their start in the Champions program, or they have gotten a Champions program up and running and seeing what they can do for an organization and how they can advance the program. It's really fantastic. The amount of energy that goes into it is so great. And I just, I believe in these kinds of programs and I love hearing these best practices around how to really make them work best for you and how to advance your E and C strategy. So, Erica, thank you so much for coming on today and talking about these fantastic topics.
[00:11:28] Speaker B: Oh, Bill, thank you so much for having me. I mean, you know, you're, you're absolutely 100% right. A good Champions program is a absolute force multiplier for the work that you as an ethics and compliance professional do.
And conversely, a bad Champions program is not.
Takes you in the other direction because what you don't want is you don't want a Champions program where if someone goes to the Champion and asks a question, they have no idea what you're talking about. And, and I've run into those situations where, you know, a company will say they have a Champions program program, and then you go and talk to someone who's supposedly in that Champions program, and they don't know they're a champion and that that you absolutely do not want. So my word of caution would be if you're thinking about your Champions program. If you're planning to roll out a Champions program, make sure you and the team have the bandwidth to do it well, because if done well, it is incredibly effective.
If done poorly, it's a different story entirely.
[00:12:26] Speaker A: To learn more About Bella, visit ethesphere.com bella that's B E L A to request guest access to the Member Resource Hub and to speak with the Bella Engagement Director. If you have a question that you would like answered on this program, 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. Thanks so much for joining us. We hope you've enjoyed the show. If you haven't already, please like and subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. And be sure to tell a colleague about us as well, especially over on LinkedIn. That's where we've had some terrific engagement this year. Every like share and comment really helps the program.
That's all for now, but until next time, remember, strong ethics is good business.
