Ethics and compliance officers often share with me their struggle to communicate about the E&C program. “How many different ways can I tell them about our code of conduct, our policies and our training?”, they ask.
Two ways are often overlooked:
- Documenting: Let’s say you are in the process of revising an existing policy. Share that with your employees. Tell them you are launching the revision process and why. Later, tell them how you partnered with HR to get feedback on the first draft. Once approved, share the questions that leadership asked before approving the policy. You can do that with any project you are working on. Documenting gives you a chance to stay in front of your employees, to tell a story (that’s how people truly learn), and to add transparency to your work (transparency promotes trust).
- FAQs: If you don’t have a big project to document, then consider writing FAQs. You can easily write FAQs about your code, about each of your policies, about your training, investigations, controls, etc. All you have to do is collect the questions you get from employees and organize them. Once you have 3 or more on a given topic, you can publish the FAQ.
Of course, you can also document your creation of FAQs!
The Ethical Leader 