What you'll learn in this podcast episode

Guidance from the US Department of Justice, particularly the recent 2020 memorandum, stresses that a company’s compliance program must reflect and evolve with its risks—and should not be a snapshot or on cruise control. But in assessing those risks, it’s helpful to see what other companies in the same area or circumstances have done to meet them. Collective action and coordination can be very useful in dealing with common risks. So, when is benchmarking and a collective approach to risk helpful? And when can it backfire? In this episode of the Principled Podcast, LRN Director of Advisory Services Emily Miner continues the conversation from Episode 6 about benchmarking with her colleague Susan Divers. Listen in as the two discuss the benefits and limitations of benchmarking, and how organizations can ensure they benchmark their E&C programs effectively. 

 

Featured guest: Susan Divers

Susan Divers is the director of thought leadership and best practices with LRN Corporation. She brings 30+ years’ accomplishments and experience in the ethics and compliance arena to LRN clients and colleagues. This expertise includes building state-of-the-art compliance programs infused with values, designing user-friendly means of engaging and informing employees, fostering an embedded culture of compliance, and sharing substantial subject matter expertise in anti-corruption, export controls, sanctions, and other key areas of compliance.

Prior to joining LRN, Mrs. Divers served as AECOM’s Assistant General for Global Ethics & Compliance and Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer. Under her leadership, AECOM’s ethics and compliance program garnered six external awards in recognition of its effectiveness and Mrs. Divers’ thought leadership in the ethics field. In 2011, Mrs. Divers received the AECOM CEO Award of Excellence, which recognized her work in advancing the company’s ethics and compliance program.

Before joining AECOM, she worked at SAIC and Lockheed Martin in the international compliance area. Prior to that, she was a partner with the DC office of Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal. She also spent four years in London and is qualified as a Solicitor to the High Court of England and Wales, practicing in the international arena with the law firms of Theodore Goddard & Co. and Herbert Smith & Co. She also served as an attorney in the Office of the Legal Advisor at the Department of State and was a member of the U.S. delegation to the UN working on the first anti-corruption multilateral treaty initiative. 

Mrs. Divers is a member of the DC Bar and a graduate of Trinity College, Washington D.C. and of the National Law Center of George Washington University. In 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 Ethisphere Magazine listed her as one the “Attorneys Who Matter” in the ethics & compliance area. She is a member of the Advisory Boards of the Rutgers University Center for Ethical Behavior and served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Institute for Practical Training from 2005-2008. She resides in Northern Virginia and is a frequent speaker, writer and commentator on ethics and compliance topics. 

Featured Host: Emily Miner

Emily Miner is a director of LRN’s Ethics & Compliance Advisory services. She counsels executive leadership teams on how to actively shape and manage their ethical culture through deep quantitative and qualitative understanding and engagement. A skilled facilitator, Emily emphasizes co-creative, bottom-up, and data-driven approaches to foster ethical behavior and inform program strategy. Emily has led engagements with organizations in the healthcare, technology, manufacturing, energy, professional services, and education industries. Emily co-leads LRN’s ongoing flagship research on E&C program effectiveness and is a thought leader in the areas of organizational culture, leadership, and E&C program impact. Prior to joining LRN, Emily applied her behavioral science expertise in the environmental sustainability sector, working with non-profits and several New England municipalities; facilitated earth science research in academia; and contributed to drafting and advancing international climate policy goals. Emily has a Master of Public Administration in Environmental Science and Policy from Columbia University and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Florida with a degree in Anthropology.

 

Principled Podcast Transcript

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.

Emily Miner: Guidance from the US Department of Justice, particularly the recent 2020 memorandum, stresses that a company's compliance program must reflect and evolve with its risks and should not be a snapshot or on cruise control. But in assessing those risks, it's helpful to see what other companies in the same area or circumstances have done to meet them. Collective action and coordination can be very useful in dealing with common risks. So when is benchmarking and a collective approach to risk helpful, and when can it backfire?

Hello, and welcome to another episode of LRN's Principled podcast. I'm your host, Emily Miner, director of Advisory Services at LRN. Today I'm continuing my conversation from episode six about benchmarking with my colleague Susan Divers, our director of Thought Leadership and Best practices. We're going to be talking about the benefits and the limitations of benchmarking and how organizations can ensure they benchmark their E&C programs effectively.

Susan brings more than 30 years experience in both the legal and E&C spaces to this topic area with subject matter expertise in anti-corruption, export controls, sanctions, and other key areas of compliance. Susan, thanks for coming on the Principled podcast.

Susan Divers: Oh, Emily, it's always nice to talk with you.

Emily Miner: So Susan, before we get started, let's kind of define benchmarking and summarize the conversation that I had in our last podcast with our colleague Derek. So benchmarking means comparing what you do as an organization in this case to a usually large number of comparable organizations or individuals. And most often, this is done in a quantitative way, although there are also opportunities to benchmark qualitatively.

And at LRN, we've been using benchmarks for a number of years now through our research reports. We've conducted major panel research on the role of ethical culture in an organization and in organization's risk of misconduct. So looking at how that varies across countries, across industries. We conduct every year research into ethics and compliance program effectiveness research that you lead and that you and I collaborate on. And we've been doing that for, oh gosh, coming up on, I don't know, maybe eight years now. That's been given us a insightful look into Ethics & Compliance Program best practices, and how they've evolved over time. We've also conducted research on codes of conduct, analyzing nearly 150 publicly listed codes of conduct from the top listed companies around the world and looking at similarities and differences and best practices in that space.

But we have a brand new product at LRN that we're launching later this month that I know we're all really excited about called Catalyst Reveal, which is a platform that will, as it's name suggests, reveal insights to our clients about their ethics and compliance program, things like course level data training, data, employee sentiment, ethical culture. It will also give our clients the ability to see how their results along these metrics compare with other organizations in the LRN client universe. So looking at by industry, by company size, and a few other comparable filters.

So with that exciting launch as our backdrop, I wanted to talk to you as an expert and a thought leader in this space about benchmarking compliance programs, when to do it, when not to do it, et cetera. So let me turn it over to you, Susan, and let's start with the benefits. What are the benefits of benchmarking in ethics and compliance program?

Susan Divers: Sure, Emily, I'd be happy to talk about that. In thinking about this topic, there are really three really good functions that benchmarking is appropriate for. And then there are some where it's not so appropriate and we can talk about all of that. But starting with what it's very appropriate for, the first is if you're setting up a program, you need to figure out kind of what are the basics that you need to do at the outset. And it can be very helpful particularly if it's a new program, and it usually is if it's setting it up to be able to say your management, "We have to have a code. We have to have policies. We have to have audit. And we have to have training" and those are kind of the four basic pillars and being able to make that case. That's very basic, but it can be very helpful in terms of people who are struggling to get started in what we all know is a really complicated area.

So that's kind of the first setting where benchmarking I think can be very helpful. And then the second is you've got your program and you're up and going. Now, no two companies are alike, no two industries are alike, and I can get into that a little bit later, but it's helpful to know if you're mainstream or not. Like for example, our Ethical Pulse Culture check lets you sort of get an idea from a short questionnaire embedded in our platform in Reveal whether your culture is really out of whack or pretty much along the same lines as mainstream. And again, that's really help