It is a good strategy to remind your internal client groups from time to time where to find company policies and why they exist in the first place. One policy that deserves the spotlight is your Conflicts of Interest (COI) policy because it requests employees to disclose details about their personal activities, relationships, and investments. Employees deserve an up-front explanation about why the company cares about conflicts. Your explanation will help build trust that encourages employees to disclose potential COI. It is not enough to simply say, as your COI policy likely does, that an employee’s personal interests should not conflict with the company’s interests and how to report potential COI situations. To help employees understand why the company cares about understanding and resolving COI, consider using these talking points and examples:
Objective Decision-Making: Employees with COI may make biased decisions influenced by their personal motivations that could harm the company’s business or waste resources. For example, an employee who owns a stake in, or has a relative employed by a vendor company, may be inclined to direct business to that vendor, even if it is not the most cost-effective choice for the employee’s company.
Company Reputation: COI can lead to decisions that prioritize personal gain over the company's welfare and could harm the company's reputation and integrity. There is a slippery slope from COI to fraud. Companies which rely on their reputation for integrity as a selling point to clients – such as accounting, law, consulting and other services industries – can be particularly damaged by employee self-dealing that is publicly exposed.
Legal Concerns: Certain COI may violate laws or regulations, leading to legal consequences, fines, or sanctions. By identifying conflicts early, a company can take steps to mitigate risks and ensure compliance with applicable regulations. As an example, consider “insider trading” in which an employee with access to material non-public information about a company – perhaps your company or a business partner – uses that information to trade stocks for a profit. In that situation, the employee is using confidential information for his personal gain rather than in the best interest of the firm or its clients. Insider trading violates securities laws and can result in fines, criminal charges, and even imprisonment for the wrongdoer(s) as well as litigation and reputational damage to the company.
IP Leakage: Employees in tech and creative industries with COI can damage the IP portfolio of their employer. For example, employees can be so enthusiastic about their usual work – such as coding, building tools, designing meta environments, etc. – that they engage in similar work outside of office hours, alone or with others, putting the company’s intellectual property at risk if used. Losing IP in this fashion is like letting the genie out of the bottle; there is no getting it back in.
Transparency Builds Trust: Disclosing and addressing COI promotes transparency, fostering trust among employees and stakeholders. When conflicts are managed appropriately, it demonstrates a commitment both by employees and the company to ethical practices and accountability. Addressing COI helps establish a culture of fairness and integrity, where employees are encouraged to act in the company’s best interests. This contributes to higher morale and a more cohesive workplace since employees feel confident that their colleagues are operating ethically.
Compliance officers have at least 3 opportunities to broadly communicate these ‘whys’ of the COI policy to employees on a regularized basis: (i) within online courses and in-person training about COI; (ii) on the first page or two of your company’s COI Policy; and (iii) in the introduction to any COI questionnaires your team requires new employees or existing employees to complete.
Your Human Resources team also can act as a communications partner. It is likely that HR already helps your Compliance team to surface and resolve COI. Fully deputize HR by offering training so they feel confident to explain to employees why resolving COI is important to the company and to help maintain a culture that is built upon employees’ mutual trust and respect.
General Counsel
It suffices to have attended half a dozen conferences on compliance and anti-corruption to hear two corporate mantras: the necessity of the tone from the top, and the importance of role models…
Naturally, I do not intend to totally deny either of these but there are, in my view, flaws and dangers in relying on them too heavily.
The «tone at the top » already contains an inherent ambiguity. Indeed the issue at stake is not the "tone at” but the "action from” the top. Moreover, to suggest that the tone at the top is the single pillar of a culture of compliance entails a risk of deresponsibilisation in particular at the lower end of the spectrum of the chain of command. Most of the difficult cases that I have encountered in my practice came from the ground level and the frontline rather than from the top. And as we are talking about misleading messages let me note that a fish does not stink from its head…it stinks period. In fact any fishmonger will tell you that the first criteria for knowing how fresh is the fish is to look at it in its entirety.
This leads to the other mantra I often encountered in companies: the role model. A number of companies rely on this idea and identify internal or external figures as anti-corruption champions or ambassadors. According to the Cambridge Dictionary: “a person who someone admires and whose behavior they try to copy.” Here again let me note that someone can be admired for good or bad reasons, but more importantly a company that stakes too much on its role models may face disillusionment and cynicism if the role model fails.
Those two examples show the difficulty of anti-corruption messaging. In fact at a broader scale several studies indicates that “there is growing concern that anti-corruption awareness-raising efforts may be backfiring; instead of encouraging citizens to resist corruption, they may be nudging them to ‘go with the corrupt grain.’”*
Compliance should be everybody’s day-to-day business, often below the radar and not very exciting in terms of communication. It is certainly useful in any company to send short and catchy messages to focus the mind of all employees as long as it is clear to all that such short and catchy messages will never replace a solid and well articulated compliance program."
International Lawyer, Former Director for Legal Affairs, OECD
Gamification can take on many forms within online training, and can often be a great way to incentivize your audience to complete a course. While “gaming” can evoke images of a complex video game that would detract from the training subject matter, gamification has actually proven to create more engagement for learners.
Gamification uses strategic elements of a game to draw a learner to want to interact with training content, but does not necessarily require that a full revamp of all training courses to include gaming features. Simple steps like creating a rewards system for completing tasks or courses is enough to draw interest to training.
Consider these “easy” steps to start your journey into gamification, which you can offer within the TRACE LMS platform, and likely most training platforms currently available:
Design custom social media badges that learners earn when completing a course, and can share their accomplishments online
Create friendly contests among learners to see who can complete the most courses
Develop a Leaderboard in which your top scorers for training are listed within the training homepage whenever logging into the site
A few other things to consider, if access to online gamification functionality is limited, could be creating competitions between departments to see who can complete all of their training in the least amount of time. Winners can receive small prizes, like free coffee, or a company t-shirt or water bottle.
Simple elements like these can draw attention to learning, and keep learners interested in completing their required training. Creating competitions around scoring will keep your learning audience focused on the information they are consuming to be sure that they answer questions around the content correctly and appropriately.
It is also proven that social interaction while learning increases retention of that learning by 50%. Allowing your learners to engage in a friendly competition, or even a simple discussion and communication about the training that they all must complete helps them to learn together and reinforce your message.
Ready to get started? Please reach out to training@TRACEinternational.org and we can help you develop gamification through badges, and even content development! Happy gaming!
Associate Director, Compliance Training, TRACE
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