More Thoughts on Policies

Policies

Today I want to return to that study we discussed last week, questioning whether corporate policies make much difference to encourage employees’ compliance behavior. There is still a lot to discuss from that study, and compliance professionals’ reaction to it, in the pursuit of good insights about policy management and employee training. For those who…

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Study: Maybe Compliance Policies Don’t Matter

Policies

Here’s a rather glum start to your week: new academic research suggests that the design of corporate policies you use to train employees has no measurable effect on how well they retain knowledge about those policies, and might not do any better than not bothering to educate employees about corporate policies at all.  So says…

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Roe Falls; Compliance Programs Brace

roe

They say that a columnist writes about what people are talking about, so there’s only one thing to write about today: the immense implications of the Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate Roe v. Wade. Even at this early stage, the consequences for corporate ethics and compliance programs are emerging fast and furious.  We can begin…

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Speakup Lessons From U.S. Army

Army

Compliance professionals are constantly looking for ways to improve the speakup culture in their organizations. Today let’s look at an example of how difficult that task can be, courtesy of the U.S. Army and a recent audit of its efforts to encourage reporting of sexual assaults. The Government Accountability Office performed the audit and published…

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Delta’s Smart Approach on Delta

Delta

Corporations are struggling these days with how to handle covid vaccinations — because in modern America everything has to be done the hard way, so of course the idea of getting a free vaccination to prevent a potentially deadly illness is controversial. It’s a difficult question for many businesses. So I was intrigued by Delta…

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On Requiring Covid Vaccination

vaccination

We interrupt our regular schedule of ethics and compliance programming for fresh news about the Covid-19 pandemic: some statistics showing under what circumstances the public would or would not support vaccination requirements to participate in daily life. The statistics come from research firm Gartner, which polled 346 U.S. consumers last month. The headline is that…

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CDC Guidance Change Worth Noting

vaccination

All right compliance officers, gird your loins. The Centers for Disease Control published new guidance this week relaxing a crucial public health restriction on people vaccinated against covid, opening what could be a Pandora’s Box of policy management challenges. The guidance came Wednesday. It specifies that “fully vaccinated persons” — people who have received all…

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Thoughts on ‘Return to Work’

Earlier this week I moderated a webinar about the compliance challenges businesses will face as they strive for a post-pandemic to return to work, when I realized: we should stop saying “return to work.” That’s not quite what companies will do in 2021, and compliance officers need a better understanding of what lies ahead.  Start…

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Trump, the Coup, and Corporate Ethics

trump

Corporate America might be hoping that the difficult issues raised by President Trump’s attempted coup this week and the remaining days of his term will somehow pass them by. Too bad.  What Trump has unleashed isn’t something businesses will be able to avoid. In several practical ways, dealing with Trump and his minions — both…

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Employee Politics and Workplace Policy

political

We have an interesting item from the National Labor Relations Board this week addressing a point of workplace culture that I suspect has grown quite sore for many businesses in 2020. How much discretion do you have to fire employees for their political views?  The NLRB published an advice memo on Monday about a union…

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