What you'll learn in this podcast episode

Over the last 20 years, codes of conduct have undergone an evolution. Originally written as textbook-sized rulebooks, codes now seek to be visually engaging, readable, and useful guides to employees to help them do the right thing. And rather than covering all manner of what you can and cannot do, today’s codes aim to illustrate values-based principles of what you should and should not do. But these changes are no small task. How can organizations ensure they are designing and implementing their codes to deliver effective and meaningful change? In this episode of LRN’s Principled Podcast, Senior E&C Advisor Jim Walton talks about code reinvention with Carmen Jandacek, the Director of Ethics and Total Rewards at Arizona Public Service (). Listen in as the two discuss how APS reinvented their code of conduct to better reflect their organization’s culture, values, and employee experiences.

 

Principled Podcast Show Notes

• [2:02 ] - Carmen shares about her career background and getting into the ethics and compliance
  
  space.


• [4:07 ] - What is Arizona Public Service (APS)?


• [5:20 ] - The key drivers which led APS to undertake reinventing their code of conduct.


• [7:40 ] - The process of updating APS’s existing code.


• [10:11 ] - How was the code rewrite accepted among stakeholders?


• [12:10 ] - How did the reworked code turn out in the end?


• [13:35 ] - Carmen’s advice for other ethics and compliance teams who are thinking about
  
  updating their own codes.

 
Featured Guest: Carmen Jandacek

Carmen has worked for Arizona Public Service (APS) since 1996 and is currently the Director of the Ethics Office, Total Rewards, Health Services, HR Operations & Technology.

Carmen is the Founder and President of the APS LGBT Alliance, an employee network group, a board director of the Better Business Bureau serving the Pacific Southwest, board member of one•n•ten a local nonprofit and a member on the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce Diversity & Inclusion committee. Carmen has an undergraduate degree in management, and she earned her MBA from the University of Phoenix in 1999. 

Carmen is an avid health enthusiast and believes the key to leadership success is a healthy mind and body.  She has participated in many biking, running and triathlon races and is an Ironman Arizona finisher.

 

Featured Host: Jim Walton

Jim Walton is a member of LRN’s Ethics & Compliance Advisory Services Team – with over 25 years of professional experience in corporate, institutional and government settings, spanning the fields of ethics and compliance; environment, health and safety; and energy management.

Since 2002, Jim has been passionately dedicated to corporate ethics and compliance – designing, developing, implementing and enhancing constantly-evolving, comprehensive, best-in-class, global ethics and compliance programs. Jim has extensive experience in writing, producing and communicating codes of conduct and corporate policies; designing, managing and implementing ethics & compliance risk assessments; implementing anti-compliance and bribery initiatives; conducting third party due diligence reviews; and helping managers at all levels become better ethical leaders.

Jim is a Certified Compliance and Ethics Professional.

 

Principled Podcast Transcription

Intro: Welcome to the Principled Podcast, brought to you by LRN. The Principled Podcast brings together the collective wisdom on ethics, business and compliance, transformative stories of leadership, and inspiring workplace culture. Listen in to discover valuable strategies from our community of business leaders and workplace changemakers.

Jim Walton: Over the last 20 years, codes of conduct have undergone an evolution. Originally written as textbook-sized rule books, codes now seek to be visually engaging, readable, and useful guides to employees to help them do the right thing. Codes have also shifted their organizational priorities. Rather than covering all manner of what you can and cannot do, today's codes aim to illustrate values-based principles of what you should and should not do. But these changes are no small task; How can organizations ensure they are designing and implementing their codes to deliver effective and meaningful change?

Hello, and welcome to another episode of LRN's Principled Podcast. I'm your host, Jim Walton, Senior Ethics and Compliance Advisor at LRN. Today I'm joined by Carmen Jandacek, the Director of Ethics and Total Rewards at Arizona Public Service. We're going to be talking about how APS reinvented their code of conduct to better reflect their organization's culture, values, and employee experiences. Carmen has dedicated more than 26 years of her career to shaping the culture, ethics, and compliance at APS, and has real insight into how the company has evolved as a result of its new code of conduct. Carmen, thanks for joining us on the Principled Podcast.

Carmen Jandacek: Thanks. I'm just delighted to be here today.

Jim Walton: Wonderful. Just to start out, maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came into the ethics and compliance field. I'm always fascinated at the journeys that we've all taken to get here.

Carmen Jandacek: Absolutely, and mine was absolutely not the traditional way of coming out of college and then going into an ethics and compliance career field. I came to work for APS in 1996, and I spent the first 15 years of my career there on the human resources team. At that point in time, I was really ready for a change. I spent really primarily my time in the space of total rewards, compensation and benefits, and I wanted to look at some other areas where I could expand my career also.

An opening came up in our ethics office, and I immediately fell in love with the work. In ethics, you have such an opportunity to not only reinforce and build ethical culture, but the ability to really be the voice of employees and the ethical coach for leaders. It's a really unique role that I have purview and sight to our entire organization, so I can identify trends or issues in one area of the organization and use that as a preventative opportunity and strategy to counsel and coach the rest of the organization. So from my perspective, ethics and compliance work is rich, it's never dull, and it's highly underrated. I think ethics and compliance organizations are the backstop to good governance at any organization.

Jim Walton: That's great. I couldn't agree more, and I think your unique background is really a wonderful add to the ethics and compliance community. It's always fascinating to me to see kind of the multifunctional, and the variety and diversity of backgrounds of ethics and compliance professionals, and it only adds to our effectiveness. So, thanks so much for that. I wondered if you could also just set the stage a little bit by giving us a little bit of background about Arizona Public Service, for those who might not know much about your company.

Carmen Jandacek: Sure. At APS, we are a subsidiary of Pinnacle West Capital Corporation. We have roughly 6,000 employees, and we serve 11 of the state's 15 counties. We're headquartered in Phoenix, but we are serving primarily the entire state of Arizona. In fact, more than 1.3 million homes and businesses are served by us, and we've made some very bold commitments. We're committed to providing a hundred percent clean, carbon-free electricity to customers by 2050, and we are well on our journey to doing so. We are 50% clean energy today. We also run Palo Verde Generating Station, the nation's largest clean energy producer that is west of Phoenix, and that's really the foundation of our future of carbon-free energy.

Jim Walton: Well, that's all very exciting. I know a big part of the commitments that APS is making were instrumental in wanting to rewrite and redesign your code of conduct, and we like to talk about reinventing a code of conduct. So, what were the key drivers that led you and the company to want to undertake this project?

Carmen Jandacek: Absolutely. It's been an interesting journey because I also was involved in rewriting the code that we had prior to this code rewrite. We were coming off of a code that was based on policy and procedure, that was framed in policy and procedure, and we had a couple key moments that really culminated in the work that we decided to do. First, we just went through a CEO change. In the CEO change, the CEO, Jeff Goldner, launched a significant culture change throughout the organization. So we wanted to make sure that all of what we were presenting in our code of ethical conduct embodied what that culture change was.

Part of the culture change was all about being customer-centric focus, and I fully believe that in order to really deliver on the customer experience, you have to deliver on the employee experience. So, providing frictionless delivery and service, and providing information in a way that is easy for our employees to utilize. So really what we were doing is, from a company perspective, building from the customer backwards to make sure they had a great experience, and I wanted to do the same thing from the code, making our employees with basically the customer of our product kind of front and center.

We also, as I just talked about, embarked on the bold new energy commitment to be a hundred percent clean by 2050, and that is really the backbone of the strong purpose that we have, and that needed to be really woven through all of the different documents and all of the different components of the code of ethical conduct. So all of that came together and culminated in us realizing that our current code was not going to help us bring those things to