2022 Benchmark Report Insights, Part 1

For the next part of this webinar go to 2022 Benchmark Report Insights, Part 2 To get a copy of the 2022 Ethics & Compliance Hotline Benchmark Report for yourself, download it here. Transcript for 2022 Benchmark Report Insights, Part 1 Matt Kelly : Hello, everybody, and thank you for joining us today. So we are here today to talk about ComplianceLine’s 2021 benchmarking report for the ethics and compliance hotline and we've got a lot of material to cover including some actual PowerPoint slides, which I'll pull up in due course, but thank you, everybody. And joining us to walk through all the data that they had compiled and put together are the two co-CEOs and co-founders the Gallo brothers, Gio and Nick. So guys, welcome, and how are you all doing today? Nick Gallo : Good, man. Glad to be here. Pretty excited to dive into the results of this benchmark report, and always love doing webinars with you, Matt. Love this new EthicsVerse series we're doing, you are one of my favorite moderators and thought leaders in E&C so, so glad to be here. What's up, Gio? Giovanni “Gio” Gallo : And that's saying something, because Nick is very discerning, Matt, so you really made the top of the list. Yeah, excited to be here, excited to go through this. A lot of people are hungry for this data to figure out where their program sits and where they can or should improve. Hopefully, you'll see some stuff where you say, "Hey, we're doing pretty well on that one." But so excited to jump in. Thank you everyone for joining us today, and I also am very excited to be on this webinar with you, Matt. Matt : All right. Well now let me see if we can pull up the slides. First, I will share my screen and that should them up. Oh, it looks like I cannot do this. Oh, the host has disabled screen sharing for participants like me. Nick : All right. Well, as we get that turned on, let's transfer the hosting over to Matt. In the meantime, like always, on this EthicsVerse webinar, participation is your friend. So jump into the chat, say where you're from, and, as always, we'll talk about this more in a second, but we're gonna be giving away a bunch of prizes today. So the best comments, the best tips are always gonna be, you know, rewarded here. And just...I'm gonna say this on every single one of these webinars, our greatest asset in ethics and compliance is the network that we're a part of, is the community that we're a part of. And it only works if you take advantage of it, so use this as a place to make friends, drop your LinkedIn URL in here, accept the invitations, and really lean into this network and this special thing that we're a part of. Matt, I think it's been transferred back to you now, so we should be good to dive in here. Matt : Should be. Let's see. Can I open this up full screen? Let's see. Nick : Yeah, I think hit escape and then go back to slideshow. Matt : Yeah. All right. So there you go, guys. Let me move it along here. So, all right, we already have kind of gone through the introductions of Nick and Gio and myself as moderator, and I see we've got a lot of people who are already popping into the chat. I might as well do my due diligence up front that if you do have questions along the way, you should always feel free to ask them. We'll try and save some time at the end to get to questions, but if you ask something that is especially good and on point, we're also happy to take those questions on the fly throughout the hour. So the more questions you do have, and the more points you wanna raise in the chat function, or just submit them in the Q&A feature, the better. And Nick and Gio, I don't know if you all wanna walk through this first here, but I'll let you kinda set the pace. Nick : Yeah. ComplianceLine, you know, we have a suite of corporate integrity products that range from issuing taking case management, credential monitoring, training, specialty solutions, and things like that. So our entire mission is to help make the world a better workplace by providing leaders who care with actionable information to reduce risk in their organization, improve their bottom line, and improve their culture. So a lot of this that we're talking about today really drives the speak-up-listen-up culture that I think we're all trying to build within our organizations. Your relationship with your teammates, the relationship between an organization and its employees is no different than any other relationship. There needs to be a give and take, it needs to be a two-way street, and we in ethics and compliance are the circulatory system of the organization. We touch all these different parts, and to the extent we're able to provide a means by which the employees that care about leaving the world better, making their world a better place, the extent to which we can give them a means to speak up and we can convey to them that their voice matters. We get a lot of benefits, so we're gonna be talking about a lot of those things...if you wanna hop to the next slide, Matt, today. And it's a really exciting actionable piece of the equation that we deal with every single day. So we have the hotline benchmark report for 2022. There's a lot of great, actionable tips in there, a lot of great insights. So if you want...if you don't have a copy of this right now, drop a zero into the chat and someone from our team will be sure to send that directly over to you, and you can even follow along at home if you're working from home, or if you are working from an office, we'll send that to you in either case. So, you know, like I was saying, speak-up-listen-up, you know, speak up is over. So speak-up-listen-up-culture is what the name of the game is, and what we're gonna be talking about today are not just the takeaways from these different sorts of data points, but also what you can do to sort of assess where you're at and what you can do to drive those things forward. We have so many conversations about ROI, we have so many conversations about proving our worth, we have so many people that we talk to who seem to feel like, "Man, I've been keeping my head down and I've been working so hard, and I just haven't gotten noticed." Well, what we're hoping to do here, and not only this EthicsVerse webinar series in total, but in today's conversation is to provide some ways for you to really kind of actualize, elevate, and make a broader impact in your organization. All right. So world-famous prizes. As usual world-famous ComplianceLine book giveaway for the best comments, the best questions, so please jump in this chat, share your perspective, share what you're going through, share the hacks that you've learned, and really sow some seeds in this community. As we can increase the thread count of this tapestry of culture that we're all a part of, the culture gets stronger and stronger. Also, we're gonna be giving away five free custom benchmark reports to folks that are interested in it. So if you'd like to be part of the custom benchmark report, drop a two in the chat right now, and we'll be doing a drawing for those. What's great about these benchmark reports is that we can take some of your data, we can map up against other data points, our own, and other data points in the industry, and really provide a real dialed-in methodology and a PDF that you can print out, you can give to your board, or you can give to your CEO or whoever you report to and get a real dialed-in plan for how you can improve your program. It's on us to make these improvements, and we wanna help you kind of get there with some of these tools. So with that, Matt... Gio : Just to clarify, you're saying don't just drop a zero or two in the chat, don't just ask questions. We want people to be saying, "Hey, you know what? This is interesting for me. Here's how I tackle this challenge. Hey, here's what I'm working on with my team to figure out." We want contributions from the participants, right? We got a great...we got hundreds of people on this webinar, we got thousands of points of IQ on here, so jump in and share your ideas and what you're working on in addition to your question. Nick : A hundred percent. That's exactly right, so. Okay. So let's start talking a little bit about the methodology. The point here is that there's a lot of data in this data set. So there's, you know, hundreds of that, you know, over 100,000 reports, over 1000 different organizations, and we map this across four different years. And the only sort of changes that we've made to the data is that we're just excluding people who have less than 10 reports. So we wanna paint a really conservative picture. Our thesis and our theory on this statistical analysis is that a measure of central tendency is only useful to the extent that it drives continuous improvement in our organization. And given the positive skew, I'm gonna kind of nerd out on the stats basis right now, but given the positive skew of virtually all these data sets, the mean, which we present as the number, is always a more conservative number than the median. So we wanna preserve outliers, we don't wanna smooth the data, and we wanna give a clear picture as possible across industries, across organization sizes, about what kind of number you should be shooting for and what kind of improvements are there to be had with little tweaks to your program. So this model we're gonna be coming back to time and time again, and the way we think about issue intake and case management is on the basis of what KPIs are you likely judged by. And, you know, the big headline KPI that we hear from the E&C folks that we talk with and that we help out, if not the biggest, a big one, is how long is it taking us to close our cases? You know, what reports are we getting? How can we get those up, and how can we close our cases faster? And what you're gonna see is that it's really a confluence of…can really drive naturally the kind of output or the kind of outcome that we want from this complex system. So we're gonna talk a lot about intake, we're gonna talk a lot about employee engagement, and we're gonna talk a lot about, yeah, systemic follow-up and how those can come together to drive a faster case closure time. Matt : What do we have here for us? Gio : So this is a big one. I think Nick might be buffering. So this is one of the biggest drivers that you wanna manage your team around, that you might get evaluated on, that you want to assess. You can assess a bunch of different things that are tied to the health of your intake in case management around this Issue Days Open. So what is this? This is the concept of, "I got something reported. How long did it take me to close out that issue?" Right. Do your investigation, substantiate it, get an answer, close it out. So if you're, you know... So broadly, you want this to be low, right? If someone reports what's gonna drive a good culture for you is not somebody they report and it takes four months for someone to answer it or look at it, right? Where that gets closed quickly, and we're showing the average here. So if your number is too high, you might wanna look into, "Well, how do I get better at this? Maybe I need to gather information better." Maybe the information that you're starting out with is kind of more like a hint than the first step in an investigation. Maybe there's not a lot of urgency or the proper staffing in your investigations operations, or, you know, similarly, maybe your staff is just overworked. So, you know, to fix those things, you can implement technology. There are a lot of great ways that your case management system and your case intake, whether it's on web or mobile or texting or hotline or wherever it is, that that technology can help you get through this process faster. Get it in front of the right people first, give them structured data so that they know how to go through it, and things like that. You might wanna drive more oversight. Some people are doing a great job. I love the chat, love how you guys are jumping in here saying what you're doing, what challenges you have. That's awesome. Other people say, "Hey, you know, I'm struggling with that too," or how you're meeting some of those challenges. You might drive some of those special initiatives to say, "Hey, you know what? We wanna just get some more issues reported," or, "We wanna get a different type of engagement." And you also have an opportunity to outsource those investigations, right? If your team's overloaded or you don't have that expertise, there are various different ways that you can get an external party who are professionalized in this investigation process to do that data gathering piece, and what you're at your core is gonna be that thing that only you can do, decide what should happen, interpret the information, and, ultimately, make your culture better. That is the core. And more and more what we're seeing in the compliance space is people are not just leveraging a lawyer or a consultant and say, "Hey, can you work with this?" They're leveraging a latticework of vendors and partners who can help them do the things that are further from their core so that your team can do that intelligent work that is, you know, that decision and that analysis. Matt : You know, I did just wanna say, I love talking about these kind of metrics such as Issues Days Open or Average Case Closure Time, because in one sense, you can't run a good ethics and compliance function without knowing what those numbers are, but they are also really specific to your company. Like, you really have to think through where is this number coming from? Because it could be driven by any number of factors. And certainly, you flagged case overload or staff overworked. Is it a different sort of issue you're dealing with now than you were last year? Is it an incomplete intake process, that you're spending more time chasing down information that maybe a good intake process could have caught up with that information, captured it earlier? You know, I love understanding what the metric is, but it is so difficult because there's so many ways you could nudge, say, the Issues Days Open and the Average Case Closure Time, so many different factors that a CCO is really gonna have to sit back and think, "Why exactly is this number what it is for me?" As much as we all like peer benchmarking and we should have it, you know, you could have two very different companies...or very different reasons for similar companies having different numbers. It just really underlines how tricky it can be to analyze all of this information. Gio : Yeah, it really is. There's really rich data that you can get in and find some action on. Go ahead, Nick. Nick : Yeah. I mean the best person, to your point, Matt, to compare yourself to is yourself. That's really who we're competing against. And there's a bunch of different factors that can, you know, contribute to this number. So, you know, looking at where you were in the past, s