Right punishment

The penalties for assaulting a mail carrier in the United States are steep.

This is as it should be. The health of a nation’s postal service still determines the health of that nation. Any attack on a postal service should be punished accordingly.

And so it goes in a corporation. Some activities are more important than others. An attack on those activities should trigger harsher punishments for employees. Which is why I have long said that the right punishment for retaliation is termination of employment. Compliance activities are vital to an organization’s survival, and nothing is more detrimental to a compliance program than retaliation against employees who speak up.

Democracy and retaliation

In many corporations, retaliation is defined as a negative consequence against an employee for raising a concern or participating in an investigation.

In Fulton County, some grand jurors are on the verge of being retaliated against for participating in one of the many Trump indictments. Nowadays, going against Trump puts you at risk of physical violence.

In a corporate setting, the appropriate discipline for retaliation is termination of employment. Nothing is more damaging to a compliance program than retaliation. Similarly, nothing is more damaging to democracy than violence aimed at silencing the other side. Those engaged in such violence should face severe charges.

How to raise money for Ukraine at work

In workplaces around the world, employees are coming together to help the Ukrainian people, especially the refugees. It’s a beautiful thing to see amidst the horrors of war.

Before money and necessary items can be collected and shipped to the front lines, someone at work needs to ask for donations. And this is where it gets tricky. Who can ask, and how the requests should be made, is often regulated.

It’s regulated for two reasons. First, companies want to avoid abuse-of-power situations. When senior leaders, or even first-line supervisors, ask employees to donate to a cause, many feel obliged to donate amounts they can’t afford, to causes they don’t believe in, for fear of embarrassment or retaliation. Second, some companies block all forms of solicitation, even for charitable causes, because it opens the door to union-forming activities (we won’t get into that here).

Therefore, many employers prohibit all types of solicitation in the workplace. No Girl Scout cookie sales, no toy drives during the holidays, no blankets for refugees.

Is that the right answer? Do we need such drastic measures to prevent the posting of a union flyer in the cafeteria? Here are some guidelines that can help you do good in the world without giving angst to your employer or putting undue pressure on your colleagues:

Ask a front-line employee to make the donation request, not a manager or leader.
Avoid face-to-face or email requests. Put a flyer up in a common room inviting people drop items off in a box or to donate anonymously to a GoFundMe page.
Clearly state that all contributions are voluntary, and make it credible. Use language that acknowledge the fact that many employees have already donated to the same cause outside of the office. Mention that some employees may not be able to give at this time.
Run your campaign by your HR professional and ask for feedback. Do the same with your ethics professional if you have one.

Retaliation in plain sight

The man who saved over 1,000 people from the 1994 genocide in Rwanda is now facing life in prison for criticizing his country’s president.

Paul Rusesabagina’s heroism was captured in the movie Hotel Rwanda. His humanitarian actions are known and praised all over the world. With such notoriety, one would think that he’d be untouchable. Yet, while in exile, he was tricked into boarding a flight to Rwanda, and then cowardly accused of terrorism. After the charges were filed, his attorney was forced to leave the country. This his happening in plain sight, and no one seems able to right this wrong.

If such a man can suffer retaliation, imagine how one of your front-line employee feels when deciding to report wrongdoing they’ve observed. They are not famous. They do not have powerful allies. What can you possibly say to this employee to convince them that all will be well in the end?

Nothing, really. But you can show them how you try to prevent retaliation, and how you don’t tolerate retaliation when it happens.

Do this over and over again, and you just might give someone the courage to speak up.

Retaliate at your own risk

The top five editors of a Hong Kong media outlet were arrested yesterday because they published articles calling on foreign agencies to impose sanctions on the Chinese government.

Leaving politics aside, they are being punished by their government for criticizing it. The result, and perhaps the goal of these arrests, will be to silence others who are thinking of making similar claims.

In the corporate world, this is the type of retaliation that we seek to prevent. We know that employees who fear retaliation do not report the wrongdoing they observe. When wrongdoing goes unreported, the best compliance programs collapse.

And when that happens, the collapse of the entire organization is not far behind.

Peace and quiet

I was a senior in high school when the Challenger exploded.

I was in class at the time of the launch. I think it was chemistry. The teacher had rolled in a television set for all of us to watch. I remember how quiet the whole school got after the explosion. Not just my classroom; the whole school.

Allan McDonald never stayed quiet. McDonald was the engineer who refused to approve the Challenger launch. He knew that the O-rings at the booster rocket joints would likely fail in the unusually low temperatures of launch day. He spoke up before the launch but was overruled by his company’s executives.

Then, 12 days later, in a closed hearing of a presidential commission investigating the explosion, he spoke up again and corrected the record after a NASA official tried to suggest that McDonald had approved the launch. Embarrassed, his company demoted him in an effort to silence him. When the US Government heard of the demotion, it threatened to remove the company from all future NASA contracts. McDonald was promoted back and put in charge of redesigning the rocket joints.

After his retirement in 2001, he became an advocate of ethical decision-making to engineering students, to engineers and to managers, both in the private sector and in government agencies.

He never stayed quiet on the importance of doing the right thing.

McDonald passed away on Saturday.

He can rest in peace.

On retaliation

Stories like the one of Ren Zhiqiang always remind me of the importance of a non-retaliation policy in an organization.

Granted, Ren didn’t have to compare Xi Jingpin to a naked clown. But even if he had not done so, chances are he would have ended up with a similar sentence anyway. Given his age, it’s likely to be a life sentence.

The fear of retaliation helps a culprit maintain the status quo. It is the best tool to prevent people from speaking up. When employees are not willing to speak up, it is nearly impossible to maintain a robust compliance program and an ethical corporate culture. For the ethics & compliance professional, the fear of retaliation is Public Enemy #1.

Is it safe to report wrongdoing?

I recently returned from the latest ECI Fellows meeting, which focused on behavioral ethics. This post is part of a series where I share my insights and lessons from the meeting.

According to a 2018 report from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, 40% of workplace wrongdoing is identified through tips provided by employees. No other form of identification comes close (internal audit, IT controls, surveillance, etc.).

This is noteworthy for at least two reasons, both related. First, this high percentage is achieved despite a strong fear of retaliation by employees (reports of retaliation doubled between 2013 and 2017). Second, we can unleash even more reporting if we invest in our speak-up culture rather than in our controls.

Companies should make sure they have an anonymous reporting channel and a non-retaliation policy in place. Beyond these program elements, they should focus on creating a culture where people don’t feel pressured to compromise standards and feel safe when reporting concerns (i.e. don’t fear retaliation). If done well, I would like to think that 80% of wrongdoing could be identified by employee reporting (and the rest by controls).

How can you start down that path today? Identify a business pressure and tell your employees you do not expect them to compromise their standards to overcome this pressure. Then – and this is key – ask them how they intend to meet their goals despite this pressure. They won’t believe you truly want them to do things the right way until they truly believe you care about how things get done. Once that belief is set, they will feel safe to report wrongdoing and won’t fear retaliation for doing so.

The Plain View Project

The Plain View Project is a database of public Facebook posts and comments made by current and former police officers from several jurisdictions across the United States. The database will prompt several police departments to examine their culture.

Leaving aside the disturbing posts made by some of the officers, the project confirms that having a social media policy is not enough (many of the police departments had a policy prohibiting such posts). These policies need to be enforced, which requires that posts be monitored or at least audited regularly. I would hope that if the police departments had identified these posts before the Project did, they would have taken action. The conversation that is about to take place within the police force would have taken place much earlier.

The comments posted on Facebook were probably made out loud within precincts and patrol cars countless times before – and tolerated by colleagues and supervisors. Those who wanted to speak up probably feared retaliation. So now, as a result of widespread inaction, all officers, good and bad, are tarnished.

Ethical leadership takes courage.

Love the process

I’m not going to be happy just when I finally buy the New York Jets. I’m happy now trying to buy the NY Jets. You have to love the process.
Gary Vaynerchuk

Ethics and compliance professionals aim for specific outcomes. We strive to reduce the pressure that employees feel to engage in wrongdoing, to reduce the number of instances employees notice wrongdoing around them, to increase their levels of reporting when they do see wrongdoing, and to decrease instances of retaliation when they report wrongdoing.

We engage in specific actions to reach these outcomes. We seek to draft simple policies, to create effective training, to communicate clear expectations, to investigate swiftly, and to discipline fairly.

As with all in life, we have more control over our actions than we do over our desired outcomes. Thus the key to a happy work life for an E&C professional is to love the process, to do each task as well as we can, in the present. If we devote ourselves to this art, we should get the outcomes we seek. If we don’t, we’ve been handed a learning putting us back on the path to mastery.