What you'll learn in this podcast episode

According to LRN’s 2022 E&C Program Effectiveness Report, 56% of the respondents said that integrating major program elements into a mobile app was a high priority for them this year. But what does a “good” mobile solution look like? And how can you ensure it strikes the right balance of meeting compliance needs while creating an engaging—and helpful—user experience? In this episode of LRN’s Principled Podcast, Carolyn Grace, content writer and podcast co-producer, discusses E&C mobile solutions with María Fernanda Castañeda Zavala, the ethics and compliance manager at Hershey. Listen in as they explore how Hershey leveraged a mobile app to enhance the components, capabilities, and overall brand of their E&C program.

 
Featured Guest: 

María Fernanda Castañeda Zavala serves as the Ethics and Compliance Manager for The Hershey Company. She is responsible for driving the ethics and compliance program effectiveness and awareness across the company. She leads the implementation of training, communications & outreach, policy lifecycle management, monitoring, case management, and co-leads Hershey's Ambassador program.

Prior to joining Hershey, she was Ethics and Compliance Analytics Program Manager at Nokia, where she led initiatives to collect, analyze and visualize data to test compliance controls, enabling data-driven decisions to drive continuous program improvements. She holds a Master of Business Administration degree from Montclair State University, New Jersey, and an Accounting bachelor's degree from Escuela Bancaria y Comercial, Mexico. She is a Certified Compliance and Ethics Professional-International (CCEP-I) and a Certified Business Analyst.

 

 

Featured Host: Carolyn Grace

Carolyn Grace is a content writer on LRN's global marketing team and co-producer of the Principled Podcast. She specializes in writing compelling stories about ethics and compliance that resonate across business segments, industries, and personas while hitting critical KPIs for traffic and engagement. Topics she frequently covers include ESG, data privacy and protection, DEI, the role of boards of directors and leadership, corporate training and e-learning, and ethical corporate culture.

Prior to joining LRN, Carolyn was a writer and content strategist at Thinkso Creative, a boutique creative agency in New York City. At Thinkso, she wrote internal and external communications for clients in technology, nonprofit, law, logistics, and financial services sectors. Before that, Carolyn conducted trend research and cultural strategy at Horizon Media, specializing in entertainment, travel, media and technology, health and wellness, and food and beverage categories. Carolyn graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in American History and French Studies and a minor in Journalism.

 

 

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 change-makers.

Carolyn Grace: If you want your ethics and compliance program to meet your employees where they are, you need to take mobile seriously. And most E&C professionals know that. In fact, 56% of the respondents to LRN's 2022 E&C Program Effectiveness Report said that integrating major program elements into a mobile app was a high priority for them this year. But what does a good mobile solution even look like, and how can you ensure it strikes the right balance of meeting compliance needs while creating an engaging and helpful user experience?

Hello, and welcome to another episode of LRN's Principled Podcast. I'm your host, Carolyn Grace, content writer and co-producer of the podcast at LRN. Today. I'm joined by María Fernanda Castañeda Zavala, the ethics and compliance manager at Hershey. We're going to be talking about how Hershey leveraged a mobile app to enhance the components, capabilities, and overall brand of their E&C program. Fernanda is a real expert in this space with a background focused on compliance analytics and monitoring. Fernanda, thanks for coming on the Principled Podcast.

María Fernanda Castañeda Zavala: Thank you for having me, Carolyn. I'm glad to be here talking about our journey and our ethics and compliance program.

Carolyn Grace: I've really been looking forward to this conversation with you as I've been hearing nothing but success stories coming out of Hershey's mobile E&C solution. For those who aren't as familiar with your story, can you start by sharing what Hershey's ethics and compliance program was like before the app came along? What were the challenges or opportunities you wanted to address at the time?

María Fernanda Castañeda Zavala: Certainly Caroline. Well, at Hershey, we are a purpose driven organization and our ethics and compliance program is designed to promote an organizational culture that encourages ethical behaviors and lives our shared values of togetherness making a difference, excellence, and of course, integrity. Our program overall is guided by a suit of carefully crafted policies and processes developed to keep us competitive, prepared and resilient. Back in 2020 and motivated by the 2020 DOJ compliance guidance, one of our priorities in the program was to understand how our colleagues were interacting with our set of policies, our code of conduct and general information that we were putting together around our program. Our goal was to be able to measure our program effectiveness. So various data points to identifying trends, patterns, KPIs, or potential gaps.

At that point, we used to have our policy library on the internet and had the limitation that we weren't able to get any insights on the number of views or searches in the code or our policies. We were looking to streamline the process to providing training, access to our concern line, that's the way we call in Hershey, our helpline, our code of conduct and overall, the policy information. That is when we thought about having all in one place that could allow us to have metrics and provide all resources in a consolidated way. We were conscious that we wanted to do it in a way that allow our colleagues to get our information in easy to access way and ideally, on the go. We know that a good part of our workforce is not in front of a computer the whole time. And we're looking to ensure they have the support needed at their fingertips, an easy way to ask for help when required. That is when we realized a mobile app with the correct capabilities would allow us to achieve this goal. And we did our research and start working toward this objective.

Carolyn Grace: That makes a ton of sense. I think, especially hearing you talk about the ease of access and being on the go, we are in a 21st century workforce. There's no surprise there that many people are away from desktops and laptops and using their mobile devices. So your logic behind building this program into a mobile app makes a ton of sense. So let's talk about the mobile solution itself. What did you ultimately build into your E&C app and what was your reasoning behind choosing those particular elements to achieve the objectives that you were just talking about?

María Fernanda Castañeda Zavala: Perfect, yes. So as I said, we wanted to monitor our effectiveness. So our goal was to have one stop shop for ethics and compliance needs. That is why we focused on some elements that were core to our program and we wanted to make sure all of them were included in our app. Those elements are our code of conduct, our policy library, our reference guide library, or job aid library. We needed to have a direct access to our concern line and either access to our learning management system to allow our colleagues to complete their trainings on ethics and compliance, or any training overall throughout the app. And we also wanted to have a direct access to our monitoring processes, like for example, disclose a conflict or any of the processes that we have in place in the program.

We were able to design an app that is user friendly, easy to navigate and where employees can find the content in their local language. That was also an important inclusion aspect that we wanted to ensure in the app. As an example, the code of conduct is organized by section. So the end user is able to go directly to the area of interest or search on any specific content. Let's say, if I am looking to understand the company's stand on retaliation, I can go to the specific area or search by the term and the app will provide me all the resources available around that topic. Our user interface is set up in English, but the end user can select the language they want to see the content in. So we have that flexibility built in, in the app. For example, if a colleague based in Mexico will like to see all the content in Spanish, they are able to do so, selecting their preferred language and the content in the language is automatically showed.

For us, it was important to include languages, to empower all employees to have the and compliance information in their fingertips. The app also helped us to consolidate in one place, all monitoring processes, as I said, that we have in place. Our colleagues don't need to look around in the internet or different portals to find where to disclose a potential conflict, where to declare some hospitality or any of our processes. They can get into the app and find the proper links there.

The app is also a way to facilitate access to our LMS. Our colleagues can complete their trainings from their mobile phones or tablets. These greatly benefits empl