Never enough resources? A few ideas to maximize the impact of your Ethics & Compliance Program 🚀

We sadly never have enough resources and budget to make our Ethics & Compliance dreams come true. And while we work to position our role and function to get more budget and more resources, in today's blog post we discuss how we can supercharge our impact in every initiative we launch in our organization. and how we can do the best we can with what we have already. 

Limited resources, great challenges

Most Ethics & Compliance professionals are struggling with a too small team. 15 team members for 80,000 employees to impact in 70 countries is not unseen. Truth is, I have never seen a Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer say: “I have enough resources to enable my organization to manage risks effectively.”

Of course, we all work to position our function and our role effectively, and get relevant resources when needed, for example using the framework of expectations set by the authorities, who ask:

“Has there been sufficient staffing for compliance personnel to effectively audit, document, analyze, and act on the results of the compliance efforts? Has the company allocated sufficient funds for the same? Have there been times when requests for resources by compliance and control functions have been denied, and if so, on what ground?” (US DOJ, Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs, Updated March 2023).

That's really helpful to help position what we do. However, no matter how well we do that, we will always need more: more budget, more time, more people on the ground and so on. Tomorrow, we may get more resources and more budget. Today, I would like to discuss how we can do the best we can with what we have. 

What is our role, really? 

Doing the best with what we have starts with, in my opinion, being focused on our role & mission. Why are we here?

Coordinator of the Ethics & Compliance Project

No matter how "Chief something something" we may be, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that we are in charge, alone or with our small team, to protect the company all by ourselves. We act as a company wide project coordinator. Our role is to coordinate cross functional initiatives in which many many many stakeholders need to take part. We are there to help identify key risks, set the priorities, define the roadmap, and to enable the business to make adequate decisions that will help sustain a bright future, with happy employees, customers, shareholders and so on.

Being clear about what we do and what we don’t do

When short of resources, we need to be hyper focused on where we impact the most. Let’s go back to the basics of mapping our risks to enable impact. We don’t want our small team to be swamped with low risk third parties review while the big joint ventures in risky countries go unattended. A well thought through risk based approach enables us to really pinpoint where we are needed, so that we can provide adequate guidance to the business as to what to reach out for. Of course, this goes hand in hand with adequate training and awareness so as to enable the operational teams to identify what is a risk and what is not.

“Busy-ness” is not effectiveness

I have worked in Legal Directions that got asked by the business every single time something needed to be drafted: we are not scribes! Having an open door policy does not mean saying yes to and being the magic elf of everyone, like in Harry Potter. 

If we are doing everything we are asked to, we are actually probably not doing our job at all. It’s easy to get fooled by the impression of busy-ness around. While it takes an active effort to critically ask ourselves and our team, is this where we are needed? Doing this in light of our yearly roadmap will help us not get carried away. It’s really difficult, it’s about setting the right boundaries without putting people off and making them feel rejected. Many stumble over this, as this is a key soft skill.

Learn how to say no, as no is the new yes

We can all work on this in both our private and professional lives. What tendency do we have to say yes, disregarding our own needs, for the deep fear of being rejected? This impacts our teams: if we say yes to everything, they end up burnt out. This impacts our results: if we say yes to everything at the expense of this very important roadmap point, we just don’t achieve our target. In a world of limitless possibilities and limited time and resources, being focused entails saying no. There is no way around it. The best book I have ever read on this is from William Ury and provides a simple yet effective technique to say no in a way that protects your interests and nurtures the relationship, making all parties involved feel good (The Power of a Positive No, William Ury). 

Focus on what matters most, keep the focus along the way

Focus on roadmap & strategic plan

Knowing what is our YES, what we are standing up to, is of course equally critical: we cannot say no without having clearly identified what’s the most important for the business and its integrity. We need to create our strong agenda, so that we feel we are driving the project, rather than being driven by emergencies and external events falling upon us.

Take a look out of the box

You maybe inherited an organization when you joined, maybe you built a team and set up your own organization. Either way, taking a step back and looking at how you would organize your team if you had to set it up from scratch now is invaluable. What would you do differently with what you know today? Often, we are mentally limited by decisions we made as well as our past choices. We are all silent subjects of confirmation bias, defined by the American Psychology Association as “the tendency to gather evidence that confirms preexisting expectations, typically by emphasizing or pursuing supporting evidence while dismissing or failing to seek contradictory evidence.”  Asking ourselves this question enables us to take a step back and reconsider what we do and how we do it. 

Run a consistency audit

It’s one of my favorite exercises and has helped me consistently across my career to manage the “too much” for myself and my team. It’s very simple and I promise it is time well spent:

List all the steps of the value chain creation in your organization in a table, and for each step write down:

• What does your team do? What action is carried out? What risk does this action help manage?
• By whom and how is it done?
• How often this is done? Is it recurring or a spot task?
• Is the task critical or rather important or nice to have?

The idea is to focus the effort of your team on the critical. Use the last column to list what you could do differently for other tasks in order to free up time and what would be needed to do so, for example, doing things differently could be:

• Delegate to another team / team member 
• Get the help from an intern
• Stop doing it
• Use technology 
• You know best what else to put in there :).

Free your team from the slow death by admin: use technology

We hire smart people to do smart things that add value. The main problem with Ethics & Compliance is the terrible and gigantic data collection, documentation and record keeping mountain that we need to master. How do we enable our smart teams to focus on high added value work?

We need to tackle admin smartly: it’s critical and not difficult to do but at the same time, it is cumbersome and a bad use of our precious human brain time. And it certainly does not make our teams happy to spend 30% of their time on admin. It’s also quite costly if done wrong. How many times have you researched records that were in someone’s emails who has been long gone from the company? 

Often, it is striking to me to see the degree of digitization in Legal / Ethics & Compliance Teams in comparison to other teams such as marketing or sales in an organization. Most things are handled manually, the old school way. Legal and E&C teams most often work using the help of Excel, and shared folders. And that can be for sure good enough if you are operating in one location in the world with a small team and a limited number of employees to impact.

But if your organization is bigger and more complex, our E&C teams coordinate hundreds, if not thousands of activities yearly to implement adequate procedures or controls and generally speaking to show commitment to the promise of being a company that lives up to high ethical standards.

Not only is it a big organizational challenge to deploy 20 “global activities” in 30 business locations around the world with 2-3 stakeholders in each office (from Legal to Audit to Data Protection to HR), but also, once our organization is done with the completion of all of these 600 activities or so, it is extremely difficult to document all that work, retrieve it when needed, and actually know where we stand with respect to our Ethics &  Compliance program.

We end up producing excessive amounts of data from dozens of business units around the world and hundreds of stakeholders. This data needs to be collected, organized, analyzed and consolidated for reporting so that we can make sense of it. In most cases it's a mess.

Data is a two faced coin: on the one hand, good data is wonderful to know where you are and assess trends to define your performance, while on the other hand the amount of data can drown you in admin, and time spent trying to make sense of it. 

This is the one thing that machines do seamlessly and that we should invest in. At Upright Solutions, we work to solve exactly the above for Ethics & Compliance Teams, with an affordable, swiftly implemented, and easy to use platform to manage your Ethics & Compliance Governance & Reporting. And we want to bring this platform to the world! We’d love to get in touch if the above challenge sounds familiar.

I hope these few points inspired you to think differently about your limited resources. Follow Upright Solutions on Linkedin for more inspiration!

Love from Copenhagen 💜