Category: Uncategorized

Responding to allegations

According to an NPR article, most local police departments are ill-equipped to respond to cybercrime.

Mainly, this is because police officers don’t know what questions to ask when victims report a cybercrime. So the director of cybercrime intelligence for the New York City police department developed an app to help police officers ask the right questions.

This is an idea that could be used in the corporate world. Most employees report wrongdoing to their supervisors, and most supervisors are not trained on how to receive an allegation. Why not provide them with a one-pager (it doesn’t have to be an app) that provides guidance to make the reporter feel safe, to obtain relevant information, and to identify who else needs to be involved?

Larger organizations will have an HR or a legal department to handle the actual investigation. While the folks in these departments have more investigative experience, they too could use a little help from a document or an app to guide them through some of the new risks out there. What do you do when a laptop is stolen? What is the next step after an employee has given sensitive information to a social engineer? Who do you notify after you’ve sent a list of employees’ salaries to a supplier by mistake?

Look at the next problem you have at work and ask yourself if the first responders were well equipped to deal with it.

Is there an app for that?

How to change your culture

Imagine a start-up of just a few employees.

At first, every employee’s birthday is celebrated on the actual birth-day. Everyone stops working for 30-60 minutes, enjoying sweets, listening to a speech and offering a gift. This is done because the young company’s values include teamwork, respect, fun. They try to embed those values in everything they do.

As the company grows to 500, the COO decides that we can’t have 4 or 5 of these events every week. From now on, we’ll celebrate monthly. The values are still valued, yet a bit diluted.

Eventually the company becomes so large that even monthly events can’t be accommodated. Department heads are told to continue (and expense) the practice if they wish. Some do, some don’t. The culture of celebration starts to fade.

One day the company goes public and every penny is under scrutiny. P&L leaders look for places to cut costs and birthday celebrations are an easy target. If employees want to recognize their colleagues, they can do it themselves. On their own dime. The original values have little room in this larger organization.

And, just like that, we have a different culture.

Questions that can save lives

According to documents released by Boeing, one of its employees said in an email that the 737 Max was “designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys.” Another one said he would not let his family fly on the aircraft.

Are your employees having similar conversations about your products and services? Are you actively trying to learn about these conversations? Are employees encouraged to speak up? Do you have a confidential reporting channel?

And if employees do share their concerns with their managers, do the managers know how to listen? Do they know how to escalate the concerns? Do they know how to follow up? Do they know to provide regular feedback to the employees?

Answering these questions can save time. It can save money. And, in rare occasions, it can also save lives.

Emotional intelligence and the E&C professional

Today I would like to share another great piece from Tom Fox. It’s entitled “Skills for the compliance professional in the 2020s.“

In this must-read piece, Tom shares five skills that we should all focus on at the start of this new decade. All five skills are highly relevant but I would like to highlight one here: developing emotional intelligence.

We are now living in a world where machines and algorithms are increasingly taking over the tasks and decisions that humans were responsible for. If something relies on efficiency, it will soon be done by a non-human. Humans will be sought after only for highly non-efficient tasks that require the powers of adaptation, creativity and… emotional intelligence.

Examine the tasks that you do today. Make a list. Identify those that rely on efficiency and those that rely on emotional intelligence. You soon won’t be needed for the tasks in the first bucket.

What’s left on your plate?

Have you considered the cultural impact?

After a workplace investigation, management typically considers two types of actions: corrective and disciplinary.

Each type offers an opportunity to improve the organizational culture.

  • The right disciplinary action will send a message to all other employees about what behaviors are not acceptable.
  • The right corrective action will create or change a process that will direct employees towards a more compliant and ethical behavior.

To maximize the cultural impact of these decisions, management must deliberately aim to improve the culture when making them.

Hot states

Most people believe that they would go to the police if they were raped. But in fact, most rape victims don’t report the crime. In Japan, only 4% or rape victims report the crime to the police, according to a government study.

Several other studies have shown that the decisions we make in a “hot state” can be exactly the opposite of the decisions we make in a “cold state”. In other words, when we calmly imagine how we might respond to a lottery win or to sexual harassment, we usually miss the mark by a mile.

This is an important fact for E&C professionals to remember. When we receive an allegation of wrongdoing, we analyze it in a cold state. We ask ourselves questions like “What would I have done if I were the perpetrator?”, or “What if I had been the victim?” But, of course, the perpetrator (probably) and the victim (most certainly) were both in hot states, and, thus, their decisions might appear irrational to us.

(How many times have you made a decision that your later regretted because you were upset when you made it?)

We must help management recognize this reality. Of course, we can still expect employees to behave according to objective standards (e.g. don’t harass, report wrongdoing, etc.) and impose disciplinary actions when they don’t meet the requirement. But we ought to do so with compassion and understanding.

What do you stand for?

The Hallmark Channel just became a great example of why it’s important for an organization to know who they are and who they want to be.

When an ad on their channel caused controversy, they chose to pull the ad, explaining that their brand was not about divisiveness (although not about inclusiveness either). When the removal came under fire, they decided to reinstate the ad.

In the end, all we know about what Hallmark truly stands for is the importance of ad revenues.