Corporate Culture Under Strain, Part I

Compliance officers, we need to talk about corporate culture. It’s been going through some stuff lately,  that stuff could have big implications for the compliance programs you so desperately want people to take seriously.

First is the push to bring employees back into the office once and for all — full time, five days a week, and if you don’t like it you can just keep quiet. How are compliance officers supposed to encourage a speakup culture when management treats employees like that? 

One example of this tension is JPMorgan Chase. Earlier this month the bank told employees (all 300,000 of them) that they would need to go back into the office full-time starting March 1. Lots of employees weren’t thrilled at that prospect of longer commutes, higher childcare costs, and the like, so when management posted its new policy to the company’s internal website, they spoke up to complain. In response, JPMorgan turned off the comment capability on that posted policy.

I’m fascinated by this one-act drama of speakup turned to silence, because it brings so many of the challenges and nuance for a strong corporate culture into sharp relief. Like, aren’t employees supposed to speak up? Yes, compliance officers have been hearing — and hammering home — that message for years. On the other hand, do we really want employees speaking all the time about everything? Because that sounds like a recipe for endless noise. 

That’s the tightrope that senior management is forcing compliance officers to walk right now as companies barrel forward with new directives that reshape corporate culture so profoundly. 

The Delicate Art of Speakup Culture

Let’s start with the basics. Ethics and compliance officers want to foster a speakup culture — but you want employees to feel comfortable speaking up about what, exactly? That’s our first question. 

Well, that’s easy. You want employees to feel comfortable speaking up about their suspicions of corporate misconduct, regardless of whether those suspicions are accurate or not (figuring out that part is your job) or what those suspicions specifically are (legal violations, policy violations, or somebody’s poor personal behavior). You simply want a corporate culture where if they see something, they say something. 

So in that narrow sense, a compliance officer might look at an unpopular return-to-office policy and say, “Not my problem.” Ordering employees to work in the office is not illegal. It’s not misconduct. A compliance officer’s interest is employees speaking up about misconduct they see, which is not the same as speaking up about workplace conditions they dislike.

Now comes the tricky part: how do you separate issues that are clearly in the ethics and compliance realm, such as an FCPA violation or accounting fraud; from more general management issues such as return to the office? And even if you could disentangle them, is that even a wise idea? 

That’s the part of JPMorgan’s return-to-office drama that gives me pause. I understand why management might want to stifle unhappy employees speaking up about the policy. Management already knew its policy change would spark dismay, and quantifying that dismay by letting comments pile up on the message board wouldn’t tell senior management anything it didn’t already know. They were still going to push this policy through to completion, no matter what.

On the other hand, the new return-to-office policy, and management’s disinterest in hearing feedback about it — what message does that convey to employees about what management thinks of them? That’s easy, too: it conveys the message that management isn’t interested in hearing employees’ complaints. 

 

So is a draconian return-to-office policy an ethics and compliance issue? No, it’s not. But such policy, and how you handle complaints about it, is a corporate culture issue, and therefore has an effect on the ethics and compliance culture you want to achieve. 

That is, draconian, take-it-or-leave-it policy pronouncements drive employees to think, “The company doesn’t care about me.” They feel a lack of respect, and a lack of trust. 

When that same company then turns around and says, “But please, do tell us about misconduct you see, we want to be an ethical organization and you’re vital to the success of that objective” — I mean, would you believe that either? 

Always Back to Listening

We’ve written before in these pages about the importance of listening to employees, but we mostly discussed that idea through the lens of a compliance program: the need for a responsive hotline, for intensive training of managers, for communications that show employees management listens to whistleblower reports, and so forth.

Those “mechanical” issues are all important, to be sure; but they’re not the same as what we’re discussing here today. A truly strong, successful corporate culture — one where employees truly do feel like they belong to something bigger, so they want to speak up about issues because they’re protecting that larger thing — is one based on respect. When employees truly feel and believe, “Management respects me and my concerns,” that’s when they want to speak up about misconduct. 

Well, you can’t truly listen to an employee unless you respect them; unless you take stock of who they are and how they feel, and acknowledge their concerns as valid. It’s not an easy thing to do, especially at corporate scale, but that’s the key to a successful corporate culture.

And if you think JPMorgan is an example of the perils here, just wait ’til my Part II column on Facebook.

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