Here at Ethisphere, we believe there is no competition in compliance. That’s why we’re using this show as a platform to answer high-level questions about business integrity that have been posed to us by the members of the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance, or BELA. BELA is a global ethics & compliance community that provides exclusive access to helpful data, benchmarking, events, and other resources to advance your E&C program. It also provides a concierge service by which members can submit questions around best practices, and our internal experts will provide an answer, plus helpful resources with more information. Many of these questions are particular to a specific company’s needs. But many more of them speak to challenges or opportunities facing E&C professionals everywhere. So in this episode, we’re going to answer one such question as part of our ongoing mission to make the world a better place by advancing business integrity. In this episode, revisit a series of interconnected questions around the topic of investigations, through the insights of BELA Chair Erica Salmon Byrne. 0:54: 5:23: 12:51: 15:55: Chapters (00:00:54) - How should managers respond to reports of misconduct?(00:05:23) - How do I check for post-investigation or post-survey retaliation?(00:12:51) - How do I substantiate a claim of retaliation?(00:15:55) - What strategic purpose should my investigations substantiation rate be serving?
After a year of CEOs getting caught on kiss cams, facing charges for looting their own company, or fielding tough questions form the DOJ about financial mismanagement, Ethisphere Editor in Chief Bill Coffin looks to what we should really be taking away from all of this leadership churn...and what it means for E&C programs everywhere. RELATED EPISODES E&C Lessons from the First Brands Bankruptcy: https://www.youtube.com/live/dGdjsuS7hOg?si=Ukjb6teEPyId-Y-d Ethicast Reacts: Nestlé CEO Ousted Over Code Violation: https://www.youtube.com/live/k5hmZLovn2Q?si=_TTbthb-mvHYPxFZ Ethicast Reacts: Embezzlement at the Detroit River Conservancy https://youtu.be/C-XUaM33QYY?si=RrK3Qpos1vkke5b2 Ethicast Reacts - Kohl's CEO Termination & NFL Prankgate https://www.youtube.com/live/n4x5HpWuTv8?si=Bo6Bsk1pFM3uv6_ Visit the Ethisphere Resource Center,: www.ethisphere.com/resources
Once an investigation into reports of workplace misconduct is closed, organizations often conduct a root cause analysis (or RCA) on the issue. But is that always the right course of action? Should root cause analysis be conducted for all investigations, or are there certain criteria that should trigger a root cause analysis process? It’s a good question, because there are plenty of obstacles to overcome when conducting effective root cause analysis, from incorporating the right data analytics to securing leadership buy-in. And perhaps the biggest one of them all is ensuring that the lessons learned after conducting root cause analysis translate into sustainable change, rather than become an unimpactful check-the-box exercise. Ethisphere's Jodie Fredericksen and Eric Jorgenson explain. 1:53: Criteria that should trigger a root cause analysis 4:02: Common obstacles that prevent effective RCA 6:58: How to leverage root cause analysis data to identify trends 8:03: How to ensure that root cause analysis translates into sustainable change 9:08: Common mistakes when conducting root cause analyses….and how avoid them
In this episode, BELA Chair Erica Salmon Byrne returns to the topic of internal investigations and answers a most interesting question from the membership of the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance (BELA): What strategic role should your substantiation rate play? Stick around for a compelling story Erica shares in which an unsubstantiated claim at one company led to a shocking discovery. To learn more about BELA, request guest access to the Member Resource Hub, or speak with a BELA Engagement Director, visit www.ethisphere.com/bela
On a long enough timeline, an inevitable outcome of workplace investigations is disciplinary action. Applying the right level of outcome to an investigation is crucial to a fair and effective ethics and compliance program. It’s something that the Department of Justice’s Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs encourages, but doesn’t necessarily require, which places it in the realm of voluntary best practices. But what is the DOJ really looking for? And what really constitutes a best practice? In this episode, Ethisphere's Jodie Fredericksen and Eric Jorgenson discuss how calibrating discipline is an important—yet often overlooked—aspect of an effective workplace investigation. For a ton of free, in-depth reports, guidance documents, articles, videos, and more to help you reach ever-higher levels of excellence in ethics and compliance, visit the Ethisphere Resource Center, at www.ethisphere.com/resources Chapters (00:01:39) - Why it's worth talking about discipline calibration from an Ethics & Compliance point of view(00:03:45) - How E&C organizations calibrate discipline today(00:05:51) - What the DOJ is looking for, and what constitutes best practice(00:08:56) - What companies are doing to implement discipline calibration and recommended practices(00:12:20) - Final thoughts
In BELA Asks, we answer to high-level questions submitted by the members of the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance (BELA) - a membership community for ethics and compliance professionals - for the benefit of E&C teams everywhere. In this episode, BELA Chair Erica Salmon Byrne explains what consequence modeling is, how you can use it to advance your E&C program, and why E&C practitioners everywhere should look to their allied functions for ideas. To learn more about BELA, request guest access to the Member Resource Hub, or speak with a BELA Engagement Director, visit www.ethisphere.com/bela
Ethical culture is at the heart of business integrity. It is measurable and can create a virtuous cycle of psychological safety, values-based leadership, and higher financial performance. But it doesn’t always go that way. Every culture, no matter how well-meaning, lives with certain pressures that, if not handled the right way, can foster poor-decision making and foment unethical behavior. In this episode, organizational culture expert Tobias Sturesson describes how his experience in freeing himself from a religious cult and unlearning its toxic behavior patterns has given him unique insight on how to help organizations build strong, ethical cultures that enable people to perform, thrive and act with integrity when under pressure. Learn more about how Tobias can help your organization here: www.heartmanagement.org Read Tobias's book, You Can Culture, here: https://youcanculture.com/ Listen to Tobias's podcast, Leading Transformational Change, here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leading-transformational-change-with-tobias-sturesson/id1504162092 For a free demo of our Ethical Culture Accelerator, visit here: www.Ethisphere.com/solutions Chapters (00:02:08) - Tobias's compelling personal story of how he went from toxic cult to ethical culture(00:06:27) - Ensuring that top-down cultural leadership delivers results through every layer of the organization(00:10:27) - How to rescue a culture in danger of going off the rails(00:12:57) - Recommended first steps for building a strong, ethical culture
One of the best benefits of membership in the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance (BELA) is that members can submit any question regarding ethics & compliance, and our internal experts will provide an answer, plus helpful resources with more information. And while we invite everyone watching and listening to join BELA, we also know that there’s no competition in compliance, which is why the Ethicast thematically responds to high-level questions from the BELA community for the benefit of E&C teams everywhere. In this episode of BELA Asks, BELA Chair Erica Salmon Byrne addresses the concept of a "test-out" style of training, and if there are good use-cases for organizations to have that option. #Ethisphere #EthicsandCompliance #TestOutTraining #EandCTraining
In late September 2025, aftermarket auto parts manufacturer and brand owner First Brands suddenly filed for bankruptcy, which took many in the world of finance (and auto parts) by surprise. But the failure was a long time coming, fueled by a debt-driven acquisition strategy and more importantly, an opaque, asset-based finance system that exists largely outside of regulatory restraint and perhaps even the most basic tenets of good corporate governance. In this episode, Ethisphere Chief Strategy Officer Erica Salmon Byrne provides a helpful look at what happened with First Brands, lawsuits and investigations into allegations of fraud and embezzlement, and what E&C leaders can learn from this as fears of contagion in the world's shadow lending system seem poised to spread to other parts of the global economy. How basic corporate governance could have prevented disaster The red flags that something was amiss at First Brands...and those who ignored them How do you stop financial mismanagement at the top level of leadership? Indicators suggest there are more stories like this out there waiting to happen Why E&C really is a risk management strategy you can't afford to do without Learn how to protect your business and supercharge your success. Visit www.ethisphere.com today for free resources, a look at our unique data & assessment solutions, the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance, and more!
One of the highly utilized benefits of the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance (BELA) is its concierge service, in which members of the BELA community can submit any question regarding ethics & compliance, and our internal experts will provide an answer, plus helpful resources with more information. Since there is no competition in compliance, we respond thematically to high-level concierge questions for the benefit of E&C teams everywhere. And in this episode, BELA Chair Erica Salmon Byrne addresses how organizations can best develop E&C skill matrices. Learn more about BELA, request guest access to the Member Resource Hub, and to speak with a BELA Engagement Director at: www.ethisphere.com/bela #ethics #compliance #skillsmatrix #2026annualplanning
For most E&C programs, a robust data analytics element is table stakes for running a best-in-class business integrity effort. But as data volumes grow to astounding levels, we must ask ourselves an important question: are we gathering the right kind of data? Case in point: How people feel about a particular issue is one of the most commonly overlooked data sets in employee behavior. And yet, it is an element that many data analytics programs simply don’t take into account. In this episode, Ray Day and Tony Sardella of Stagwell and Allison Worldwide explore how data around employee emotions might be one of the most critically overlooked pieces of the data analytics puzzle. To learn more from today’s guests, please reach out directly to Ray and Tony at: ray.day@allisonworldwide.com tony.sardella@allisonworldwide.com Free resources on data and benchmarking,: www.ethisphere.com/resources Data & benchmarking: https://sphere.ethisphere.com Chapters (00:02:39) - E&C programs might be flying at “too high of an altitude” when it comes to gathering and analyzing program data(00:05:19) - Approaching data analytics that focuses on emotion provides a unique insight to organizational risk(00:10:40) - Incorporating employee emotion into strategic planning leads to more ethical leadership(00:15:19) - Building out the capability to gather & analyze emotional data
On Oct. 23, the FBI indicted more than 30 people within the National Basketball Association for charges related to illegal gambling; namely insider trading-style schemes around so-called "pop bets," that wager not on a game's outcome but on an individual's performance or a specific moment or event within a game. The indictments have been described by the FBI as a major blow against organized crime, and characterize this as a major crisis for the NBA. For those within the ethics and compliance profession, this is a corruption scandal with clear lessons to teach us around subjects such as incentives, pressure, and more. With us in this episode is Ethisphere Chief Strategy Officer, Erica Salmon Byrne, as she provides her insight on how E&C leaders can take the lessons learned from this scenario and inform best practices within their own business integrity efforts.
In this special Halloween-themed episode of BELA Asks, we discuss something which many E&C leaders might find a little unsettling, if not downright scary: being called upon to justify the E&C function to the Board. With us as always is BELA Chair and Ethisphere Chief Strategy Officer Erica Salmon Byrne as she provides her signature insight to high-level questions such as these from the BELA Community. To learn more about BELA, visit ethisphere.com/bela to request guest access to the Member Resource Hub and to speak with a BELA Engagement Director. If you have a question that you’d like answered on this program, contact the BELA Concierge Service, and we’ll get to work on it for you.
In an increasingly interconnected world where supply chains have become multi-layered supply webs, the task of managing supply chain due diligence has become more important than ever. A key aspect of this is social compliance auditing, the manner in which organizations ensure that their partners and third parties are abiding by human labor law. In this episode, Craig Moss—executive vice president of measurement at Ethisphere, director at the Digital Supply Chain Institute and the Cyber Readiness Institute, and board member of the Association of Professional Social Compliance Auditors—discusses the vital role that social compliance auditing plays within the larger effort to manage supply chain due diligence. 1:30: Why supply chain due diligence has become such a critical part of enterprise risk management 4:28: Social compliance audits get way more static than they deserve 7:19: How to embed social compliance audits within a risk-based due diligence process 12:13: Connecting social compliance audit data with broader due diligence data Further reading: “Using Social Audits to Refine Supply Chain Due Diligence" at www.dowjones.com Free report - AI in Ethics & Compliance: Risk to Manage, Tool to Leverage: www.ethisphere.com
Ethics and compliance programs are often stuck in reactive mode, and the way to break out of that is to build a road map for where you see the function heading over the next year, three years, and five years. BELA Chair Erica Salmon Byrne explains how you can build a 1-3-5 road map for your E&C team. This episode stems from the BELA concierge service, in which our internal experts will answer any E&C question a BELA member poses. And since there is no competition in compliance, we respond to anonymized, high-level concierge questions here for the benefit of E&C teams everywhere. Want to join BELA? Here's how: www.ethisphere.com/bela
Organizational justice examines whether employees believe the company holds wrongdoers accountable and communicates disciplinary guidelines effectively. When we talk about speakup culture, the effectiveness of the ethics and compliance program, the power of values-based leadership, and the overall health of a culture of ethics, these things often connect directly back to organizational justice. In this episode, Malthe Helt, a Culture Analyst on the Ethisphere Data & Services team, provides his insights on how organizational justice needs to be maintained and why it sometimes feels like the most invisible part of an organization's culture. Why organizational justice is such an interesting, subjective, and compelling pillar of ethical culture How trust—the most important aspect of organizational justice—is difficult and time-consuming to build and easy to break Examples of organizations where misconduct or a breach of trust erodes organizational justice The particular challenges of organizational trust’s truism that the stronger it is and the more it works, the more invisible it becomes Measure & analyze your organization’s culture: www.ethisphere.com/solutions FREE Report - AI in Ethics & Compliance: Risk to Manage, Tool to Leverage: https://ethisphere.com/resources/ai-in-ethics-compliance-risk-to-manage-tool-to-leverage/
The SEC is using AI to detect suspicious trading patterns with unprecedented power and accuracy. So that begs the question: how can you be using AI to prevent insider traiding within your own organization? BELA Chair Erica Salmon Byrne explains. This episode stems from the BELA concierge service, in which our internal experts will answer any E&C question a BELA member poses. And since there is no competition in compliance, we respond to anonymized, high-level concierge questions here for the benefit of E&C teams everywhere. Two Workers at Filing Agent to SEC Edgar Get Insider Charges: https://fortune.com/2025/06/28/sec-workers-edgar-system-insider-trading-securities-fraud/ Ethisphere's free AI Report: https://resources.ethisphere.com/story/ai-in-ethics-and-compliance/page/1?hsCtaAttrib=195957177382 Want to join BELA? Here's how: www.ethisphere.com/bela
Today is Global Ethics Day, an event created by the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. The theme for this year’s Global Ethics Day is “Ethics, Re-Envisioned,” which captures the state of incredible transformation we find our world undergoing, and the significant ethical crises, challenges, and opportunities that present themselves to leaders every day. And few things are changing the landscape in the field of business ethics more than artificial intelligence, which isn't just transforming the everyday realities of E&C teams. It’s prompting leaders to wonder how they can prepare for their own next big moment of organizational transformation; how to reconcile AI’s own ethical concerns with the power it has to advance business integrity, and what "responsible AI" might look like a year or two from now. In this episode, Ethisphere's Chief Strategy Officer, Erica Salmon Byrne, discusses: How E&C leaders can use the skills they've developed to adapt to AI to prepare for the next AI-level transformation that will suddenly make everything feel upside-down all over again? How to reconcile ethical concerns about AI with the need to use it What “responsible AI” looks like from an E&C perspective Read AI in Ethics & Compliance: Risk to Manage, Tool to Leverage: www.ethisphere.com Register for the 2026 Global Ethics Summit: www.attendges.com
Reductions in force (RIFs) are deeply unsettling for any workplace, often prompting remaining employees to keep a low profile in order to protect their job. Unfortunately, this can also erode their willingness to call out witnessed misconduct. In this episode, Erica Salmon Byrne, Chef Strategy Officer of Ethisphere and Executive Chair of the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance (BELA), discusses how organizations can mitigate the impact RIFs have on speak-up culture. This episode stems from the BELA concierge service, in which our internal experts will answer any E&C question a BELA member poses. And since there is no competition in compliance, we respond to anonymized, high-level concierge questions here for the benefit of E&C teams everywhere. Want to join BELA? Here's how: www.ethisphere.com/bela
More than 85% of employees say that they would report an instance of workplace misconduct if they observed one. However, when the moment of truth arrives, only about half of the people who said they would report actually follow through with it. A big reason why is that for many employees, speaking up about misconduct carries the very real risk of being punished overtly or covertly by their peers and managers for it. In this episode, Ethisphere's VP of Data & Services Jodie Fredericksen and Director, Data & Services Eric Jorgenson discuss how ethics and compliance teams can implement meaningful anti-retaliation protocols that reduce workplace payback, increase speakup rates, and build a stronger culture of integrity. 2:36: Why is workplace retaliation such a persistent problem? 4:30: Are some forms of retaliation worse than others? 6:18: What anti-retaliation measures should every company employ? 10:14: How should companies communicate their anti-retaliation policy? 12:19: What aspects of retaliation continue to shock and astonish? Anti-Retaliation resources: https://ethisphere.com/resource-search/?post_type=resources&s=retaliation&topic=-1&type=-1