The concept of minimal viable audience (MVA) works well for most businesses. You don’t have to convince everyone that your product is right for them. Instead, you can focus on customers who already want what you have to offer.

When you try to please everyone, you risk creating an average product. This might be why ethics and compliance education, pushed to all employees, is often considered mediocre (and not that effective). What if instead we focused on the MVA?

The MVA for E&C education can often be our supervisors. They usually represent 10-15% of the employee base, having on average 8-10 direct reports each. It’s easier to tailor education for this small group, and it’s easier for them to pass the information on to their direct reports, whom they know well.

I’m not suggesting that all E&C education should be in the form of supervisor-led training (SLT). But I do believe that SLT has its place, and that not enough companies are making a good use of it.

I suspect readers of this blog know the importance of saying thank you.

But there are subtle ways you can use to magnify your gratitude. Here are some that I found in this article:

• Use positive adjectives when saying thank you: “Thank you for being so diligent in completing this task. You kept the project on track.”
• When people ask for your help, thank them for reaching out to you. Yes, they are adding to your full plate, but more importantly they are offering you a chance to contribute.
• Is a colleague updating you on a long-term, time-consuming, high-visibility project? Offer to help them with a small task, like scheduling the next meeting or preparing the agenda. Volunteering for this 5-minute task will not only make your colleague feel appreciated, it will provide much-needed stress relief (it’s much needed, no matter how small the relief is).

And by the way, dear reader, I appreciate you.

HT to Corporate Compliance Insight

The Democrats just launched the Congressional Dads Caucus.

Some critics on social media have attacked the initiative because, they claim, we still haven’t done enough for working mothers.

It is true that much more still needs to be done for mothers. However, it seems to me that mothers have struggled more than fathers in part because our culture did not, for the longest time, considered fathers as equal partners in parenting. By offering paternity leave, counseling services for fathers, on-site childcare, and flexible work schedules, fathers can be more present in their children’s lives, and provide much needed support for mothers.

In the current political climate, I don’t expect politicians to solve this issue. But I do believe that employers are in a good position to help mothers by helping working fathers.

Can your workplace do more for parents?

The problem with most speak-up initiatives is that they are rarely coupled with an initiative to show managers how they can listen better and take actions that inspire trust.

How well a manager listens to an employee who is reporting wrongdoing will determine how likely this employee is to speak up again in the future. Here are a few tips for managers:

• Actively engage with your employees by asking follow-up questions and gather as much information as possible. This shows that you are taking your employee’s concerns seriously and are committed to understanding the situation fully.
• Ensure that the employee’s report is kept as confidential as possible. Only share with those who have a need to know. This will help the employee feel more comfortable reporting the misconduct and will also reduce the likelihood of retaliation.
• Be as transparent as possible about the steps you are taking in response to the employee’s report. This includes communicating with the employee about the status of the investigation and any actions taken as a result of the report (subject to privacy rules and common decency).
• Share with the employee your understanding that reporting misconduct can be a difficult and stressful process. This can be done by actively listening to the employee and acknowledging their feelings.
• Follow-up with the employee after the investigation to ensure that the employee feels heard and respected, and to check if there is anything else the employee needs.

The better we listen, the more they will speak up.

Today I asked GPT3 to write a 200-word blog post about business ethics. It wasn’t original but it was surprisingly good.

In a few years, AI will be able to write codes of conduct, corporate policies, training modules, and probably answer many ethics questions from employees.

E&C professionals should embrace this fact and anticipate the changes it will create. The creative aspect of our job is what still remains out of reach for machines.

Do you know how to boost your creativity? GPT3 just served me 9 suggestions.

We’ve all heard it before: 80% of people believe they are above average.

Here’s another discrepancy uncovered by Princeton University: 80% of Americans support climate action but they think that only 37% of their fellow citizens agree with them.

If we asked employees in corporate America if they think that ethical business practices are important, I bet at least 80% would say yes. But how would they rate their fellow employees? Probably lower, fooling themselves to believe that they are a minority.

People tend not to act when they believe they are in the minority. As a leader, sometimes all you have to do is show your peers that they are in fact in the majority.