Posts Tagged ‘speakup culture’
An Intriguing Whistleblower Award Case
We haven’t talked about whistleblower awards in a while, but a recent spat over one such award from the Securities and Exchange Commission might be worth our attention. It raises some interesting questions about whether the SEC’s whistleblower award policies might squelch employees’ incentives to first report misconduct concerns on internal hotlines. The SEC issued…
Read MoreImportance of ‘Feeling Heard,’ Yet Again
By now most people have heard that grand juries in Washington and Chicago are declining to indict people arrested for anti-ICE protests. The political subtext here is that juries in Democratic regions won’t indict people arrested by the Trump Administration. What does that tell us about the breakdown in cultural norms within large organizations? That…
Read MoreBoeing’s Report on Speakup Culture
Today we return to Boeing and the various steps it’s been taking to improve its safety and compliance culture. The company discussed those steps in an “aerospace safety report” Boeing released a few weeks ago, with lots of material on how Boeing is trying to improve its speakup culture. Let’s take a look. Boeing has…
Read MoreNuggets From Navex on Internal Reporting
Compliance software vendor Navex released its 2025 Whistleblower Benchmarking Report last week, a document always worth reading for its analysis of trends in internal reporting and what those trends might mean for your compliance program. Let’s take a look, shall we? The Navex report is useful because it’s so expansive, this year crunching 2.15 million…
Read MoreCompliance Programs and Leaks
This week I’m in Portugal at the Society of Corporate Compliance & Ethics’ annual European conference, where I attended an excellent discussion on the ethics and compliance challenges of employees leaking confidential matters outside the business. So in the spirit of leaks, I took lots of notes and now pass them along to you. Compliance…
Read MoreAnother Pre-Taliation Sweep!
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s campaign against companies using pre-taliation language in their employment contracts continues, with seven businesses sanctioned this week for making employees sign away their eligibility for whistleblower rewards. In total the companies will pay more than $3 million in penalties. The SEC announced its enforcement action Monday morning. The worst offender,…
Read MoreEthisphere’s Latest Ethical Culture Survey
Ethisphere has released its latest report on employees’ perceptions of ethical culture, finding that those perceptions generally improved throughout the pandemic, although we have a few troubling patterns with young workers worth pondering. Generation Z workers, the report found, are the least likely demographic to report bad behavior. At the same time, however, Gen Z…
Read MoreSuicide Prevention & Speak-Up Culture
Today we have a reminder about the importance and value of a speak-up culture from a rather unlikely source: the new U.S. suicide prevention hotline, which is already receiving more calls than anyone expected. The 988 hotline went live on July 16, replacing the longer, toll-free hotline number that people had used for decades prior.…
Read MoreSpeakup Lessons From U.S. 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…
Read MoreMore on the Challenges of Listen-Up Culture
Today we have a disturbing lesson on ethics and compliance from New Hampshire, where police are frantically searching for a seven-year-old girl who apparently has been missing since 2019 — because nobody took the girl’s drug-addled mother seriously while she tried to raise alarms about her daughter for months. The girl is Harmony Montgomery. She…
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