Posts Tagged ‘speakup culture’
Another 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…
Read MoreCulture and the Cuban Missile Crisis
I am a bit of a history buff, so lately I’ve been reading Nuclear Folly, a new chronicle of the Cuban Missile Crisis written by Ukrainian history professor Serhii Plokhy. Little did I know when I began reading it, that a central lesson of good corporate governance would be a major theme of this book. …
Read MoreLeadership Failures at Fort Hood
Compliance officers have another case-study in flawed corporate culture and problematic leadership to consider. This one comes from the U.S. Army, in a blistering report on senior officers’ failure to prevent sexual assault at the Fort Hood military base. The Army fired or suspended 14 senior officers Tuesday for their leadership failures at Fort Hood,…
Read MoreA Must-Read on Whistleblower Retaliation
Anyone who cares about a strong ethical culture and protection of whistleblowers — which should be all compliance professionals everywhere — should read a column in the Washington Post this weekend written by Alexander Vindman, the national security officer driven out of the military because his whistleblower report led to President Trump’s impeachment. Whistleblower retaliation…
Read MoreStudy: Second-Hand Reports More Reliable
Some news that’s both useful to corporate compliance officers and totally relevant to our political drama in Washington: fresh research shows that whistleblower reports based on second-hand information tend to be more reliable than those from first-hand reporters. Moreover, second-hand reports are more likely to be about accounting or business integrity issues; and the more…
Read MoreSome Points on Why People Stay Silent
Ethics and compliance officers often need to consider the psychology of whistleblower retaliation and the culture of silence around corporate misconduct. Why do groups of people tolerate things they know are wrong? Why do people punish those who sound the alarm, rather than join them in defense of what’s right? As you ponder those questions,…
Read More