[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi everyone.
Today we'll look at how financial services leader Principal Financial Group maintains its best in class ethics and compliance program by keeping culture at the center of it. I'm your host Bill Coffin and this is the Ethicast.
In the highly regulated world of financial services, running a top notch ethics and compliance program is table stakes for for maintaining one's ability to do business at all. But Principal Financial Group recognizes that this goes deeper than merely abiding by regulatory expectation. When you're in the business of helping people secure a sound financial future for themselves, their families and their enterprises, one of the things that separates truly outstanding companies from their peers is their commitment to ethics and integrity at all level of the organization. And that's what Principle does. It's built a long standing and well deserved reputation for being an ethical and trustworthy company through strong governance, effective risk management practices and transparent reporting. Its ethics and compliance program is grounded in a core value of doing what's right. It maintains high ethical standards by reinforcing the understanding of and adherence to its global code of conduct, related policies and legal and regulatory requirements across the organization by delivering education, training and conducting risk assessments. But Principle's deep focus on culture brings these things together and makes them greater than the sum of their parts. So it should come as no surprise that Ethisphere has recognized Principal with a coveted Compliance Leader verification designation through 2026 and why Principal is also a 15 time world's most ethical Company's honoree.
Joining us this episode to share some of the secrets of Principal success is Naren Fierro, Senior Vice President and Enterprise Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer. Noreen joined principal in 2022. She has extensive experience in the financial services industry, both in house in legal and compliance roles and as outside counsel. Prior to joining principal, Nareen served as the Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer at Guardian Life and in various senior compliance and legal roles at Prudential Financial.
She currently serves on the Advisory committee for The James Tricharico Jr. Institute for the Business of Law and in house Counsel at New York Law School. And she is a trustee for the nonprofit organization Court Appointed Special Advocates of Morris and Sussex Counties in New Jersey which is which helps children in the foster care system. She is a frequent industry speaker on the topics of leadership and compliance. And I'm happy to add she is also a member of the Business Ethics Leadership alliance community. Noreen, welcome to the Ethicast. I am delighted to speak with you today.
[00:02:38] Speaker B: Bill, thank you so much for having me. I'm very happy to be Here. Thank you.
[00:02:42] Speaker A: How has your long term focus on consistent recurring culture measurement helped to position your ethics and compliance team as a trusted strategic advisor within your organization?
[00:02:54] Speaker B: You know, it's a great question and the best advice I think I could give. We've kind of leaned into this over the last few years, is trying to measure culture in a consistent way.
I think a lot of organizations do culture surveys. They either include them in employee opinion surveys or other things. Some do standalone.
But the one thing that benefited our program overall, Principal had always done a culture survey, but they were using a different survey every year.
And what, what made that hard was it's really hard to start to track and trend where you have opportunities, where you may need to do a little more communication or leaders may have to dig in a little more. And we adopted a consistent approach to our questionnaire. We and that has allowed us in the last couple of years to really start to track trends and where we're, you know, having positive impact, where we may have opportunities. And what I would say about that is it's also allowed us to delve deeper into the results and provide those to our leadership team, sharing with them their individual scores, sharing with them year over year, what's going well in their departments.
I think we all know as leaders, sometimes we can have blind spots. We think things are going great. We don't realize people are feeling overwhelmed, overworked or, or whatever that is.
And we have found the culture survey, the consistency of it to really be appreciated by our leadership team and our ability to kind of drive into the results and really kind of help them interpret the results, that helps them. It helps us drive what the overall macro components of our ethics program look like. It helps us partner with HR to kind of look at things and ways they can assist through the stuff that they do and are accountable for. And so we have found that consistent approach to really be a benefit to the information we're getting and allowing us to really understand the pulse of the employees.
[00:05:04] Speaker A: What are some examples of how the way you have developed an organizational skill set around measuring, analyzing and improving your overall culture has helped you to meet the business units where they live, so to speak, and better understand how to
[00:05:16] Speaker B: enable them to succeed what we've tried to do. And again, this is an evolving maturation process for us as well.
Some of these results are hard to interpret and so the last thing you want to do is just kind of send a blind email with results with no interpretive information, with no guidance.
Understanding every one of these leaders is going to need to tackle their opportunities in a different way. To your point, Bill, right. How do you meet that team's needs or that leader's needs in a way that, that's going to resonate with their, their employees versus treating it like a one size all approach. Right. That should not work. So what we've really done is when we get the results of the survey, we take our time interpreting the results, we take our time drilling as far down as our survey will allow us to drill down.
We embed thematically the comments that employees write in through the free form that our survey allows for, which are hugely insightful and help us interpret what the survey results are actually trying to tell us. We consolidate all of that into a much more user friendly report back to a leader and then we meet with them. We don't just send it to them, we meet with them and we walk them through ideas on how they might want to tackle some of their opportunities.
We give them ideas on how to celebrate, you know, the positive, you know, information they're receiving. But really by doing that, we work with them to ensure that talking about ethics, thinking about culture is not just a one time a year thing when the survey comes out.
And so a lot of our, I would say, recommended action plans for them are meant to kind of go over the span of a period of time. Right. It's not just, hey, you got these results, talk to your team and kind of put it to the side. It's really much more of a build on things over, over the next year.
And then that allows us to one, help them because we'll do the survey again the following year, we'll have a better sense of whether that resonated or not. And are they tracking, you know, better, higher scoring?
That also helps us understand if our guidance is impactful as well.
But we really take our time and try to create bespoke plans for leaders because that's the only way you're going to really reach your broader employee population.
And we have found that to be helpful.
Leaders have gotten to a point, you know, three years, it'll be four years, you know, receiving these results where they're asking for them, they're looking forward to that meeting.
And then the other thing we do, and this is probably just a common sense thing, but I think it, it helps. We never send a leader's results to their leader before sending it to them. So in terms of sequencing, we show the respect for the leader of that area to meet with them first before giving it to their boss. Because of course, their Leader is going to be like, okay, you know, Noreen went down this year. I wonder what's going on in Noreen's area.
And in fairness, we want the leader who's getting scores that may be fluctuating to have an ability to address them, to have an understanding and then be able to go to their own leader and share their plans for how to address some of their opportunities. And so that may seem like a simple thing, but it goes a long way to garner the partnership, the respect, the trust among our function and the leaders to know that we really truly want to be here to help them and become their strategic advisor around this stuff and, and not there to kind of just, you know, create unneeded potential challenges for them.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: Principal's approach to culture underscores how culture itself is a marathon and not a sprint and how it really benefits from a long term strategic outlook. So how would you say this approach to advancing culture could benefit other global organizations with integrated models like Principal?
[00:09:22] Speaker B: Well, I think the first thing we all have to recognize is if you're operating globally as principal does, you know, we're in 80 markets and you know, you culture means something different based on geographic location. That is just the reality of a global organization. And what may give you insight to the culture in the United States is not necessarily going to work in Asia or in Latin America. And so really understanding, you know, what those results are telling us and then again building out something that meets that culture where their needs are. And a lot of it is, you know, when you're working in jurisdictions where reporting is not something they're comfortable with, you may get limited comments because they just, that's not their comfort zone.
It's a little harder sometimes to interpret results. But what we try to do is work with local leadership. You know, I have compliance and ethics contacts around the globe to make sure we're again, recommending and building something that works with their employee base. And what I would say for those of you like myself, who sit in an enterprise role that covers everything, you have to be able to look at it and understand that what you may be planning to do to talk about culture with US Employees may not resonate with employees elsewhere in the world. And making sure you're tailoring those messages so that they really do resonate with the employee base and align with culture and what those employees comfort zones may be because it's going to be different everywhere you go. And I think companies who are global but approach it as a one size fits all approach are probably missing out on pretty salient information that if I were them, I'd want to know.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: Well, Noreen, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for sharing Principal's success story with our audience. And once again, congratulations to you and to all of your colleagues at Principal for their much deserved Compliance Leader Verification recognition and of course, World's Most Ethical Companies Honors.
[00:11:33] Speaker B: Thank you very much, Bill. It was my pleasure.
[00:11:35] Speaker A: To learn more about the great work that Nerene and her colleagues are accomplishing at Principal, please visit their Governance, Ethics and risk
[email protected] we'll include a direct link for that in this episode's show Notes. To learn more about the Compliance Leader Verification program and to see how well your ethics and compliance program compares to your peers, visit ethisphere.com solutions for new episodes each week, be sure to subscribe to us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. And if you haven't already, please follow ethisphere on LinkedIn as well to learn more about how we help organizations strengthen and improve their ethics and compliance programs. Together, we can make the world a better place by advancing business. And that's all for now. But until next time, remember, strong ethics is good business.
