2022 Benchmark Report Insights, Part 2

For the next part of this webinar go to 2022 Benchmark Report Insights, Part 1 To get a copy of the 2022 Ethics & Compliance Hotline Benchmark Report for yourself, download it here. Transcript for 2022 Benchmark Report Insights, Part 2 Nick Gallo : Everyone, welcome to Part Two of the E&C Hotline Benchmark Report. We are here with the one, the only, Kristy Grant-Hart. If you don't know Kristy Grant-Hart, time to get familiar. Kristy is probably one of the people that I've learned the most from in the ethics and compliance game. Her books, well, yeah, I mean, all of the books are phenomenal. We'll be talking about those more in a bit. But we are here to dive into the second part, Part Two of the Hotline Benchmark Report. The woman who needs no introduction, Kristy Grant-Hart, she is a thought leader. She runs Spark Compliance Consulting, and has really built a really great business and has so many great tips. Every time I spend some time with you, Kristy, if you hear me on something after that, I end up saying something that you said and people are like, "Wow, he sounds pretty smart." So, so glad that you're here. I always love doing these with you. Thanks for making Nick sound smart. Yeah, I appreciate that. Kristy Grant-Hart : My biggest skill. Thank you. Nick : And then Gio Gallo, co-CEO of ComplianceLine, and I am Nick Gallo, and welcome to the EthicsVerse. Each week, we come together to provide you with some great insights and some great conversations about the ethics, compliance, and human resource game so that you can elevate and you can do your job better and you can be more efficient and be ultimately more effective, because that's really what the name of the game is in this last or in this next chapter of ethics and compliance. Quick word, on ComplianceLine, we have a suite of corporate integrity products, which everybody should be well familiar with here, ranging from Issue Intake & Case Management, Credential Monitoring, Compliance Training that doesn't suck. It's nowhere near what Kristy's really cool program is. If you haven't seen that, you should reach out to her and check it out. Why don't you give us a quick blurb on Competitor, Kristy, because I freaking love this thing. I wish I'd thought of this thing. Okay. Kristy : Thank you. Compliance Competitor is a business simulation software game for high-risk teams where you can facilitate with no correct answers, which makes it incredibly interesting. You're supposed to get the least worst one and it's incredibly engaging. We're happy to show it to you. Nick : Like life, right? There's no... Kristy : Like life. Yeah. Nick : ...actual correct answers anywhere. So, today we're gonna be diving into the Ethics & Compliance 2022 Hotline Benchmark Report. This is about investigations, this is about substantiation rates, and all those kinds of things. As we're getting started during this intro session, I'd like everyone to drop into the chat, where you are from. Also feel free to drop into the chat, your LinkedIn, you know, URL. And really, our greatest asset in the ethics and compliance game is the community that we're all a part of, and it only will work for you if you engage in it. So, drop those connections in. Let's get connected with each other. And as always, we are doing our world-famous EthicsVerse book giveaway. And what's really great is that we have one of our authors of two of our books. Oh, Jack, the chat is disabled, so let's go ahead and turn that chat on, please. We have an author of two of our most famous books on the panel with us today. So Kristy, your book How to Be a Wildly Effective Compliance Officer which is really required reading for everybody in the game, that is gonna be what our giveaway is. And then also tell us briefly, I know we're getting a little bit off-track already right out of the gate, but I'd like to also hear a little bit about this other book that you wrote. It's not pictured here, but the one that you wrote with Joe and with Kirsten. Kristy : Yeah, sure. It's called The Compliance Entrepreneur's Handbook . And if you are interested in creating a business, particularly in our amazing space, I think that's required reading to show you everything from starting a business to succeeding in it and marketing it successfully. Nick : When we get the chat turned on, so as always, the people who ask the best question, so it looks like the question piece is working right now. We'll get the chat fixed in a second. But please drop in questions, we want this to be very interactive, if you want us to dive deeper on something. What's great about having Kristy on and Gio on is that we are really gonna be sort of tactics-forward today. So, if you have questions, tips, techniques of your own, please drop those into the Q&A and we'll try to incorporate those into our talk track. And also, you can drop that into the chat now or into the Q&A now. If you're interested in a custom Hotline Benchmark Report, we're happy to do that. We're gonna be choosing five winners today for that, which is a great thing. So, anyways, let's get moving here. So, we talked about our methodology. If you wanna hear more about that from last time, go back and look at it, but long story short, we have a big dataset. We don't do a lot of smoothing. We do a lot of... We wanna present the most conservative information we can and we wanna show you kind of the whole picture of what folks are seeing across the board. So, today we're gonna be talking about this framework where, you know, we try to slate this whole thing out around the main KPI that your investigation process is largely judged on, and that's about closing cases faster. So, you're gonna see a common theme of talking about good employee engagement, we're gonna be talking about empathetic intake and adaptive intake to try to get that good information, and talking about systematic follow-up that's going to be a repeatable process that we can work on from a continuous improvement perspective. So, with that, let's dive into this first group. So, this is Data Point 4, and this is one of the things that we track across the board all the time, and this is about issue categories. So, why don't we start with you, Kristy. What did you find from this that you found interesting? Kristy : So, you know, we're always told that most issues are HR issues. And I think that to a certain degree, this really bears that out. So, if you look, you did a fascinating thing that I've not seen before that I will comment on in a sec. But if you look at HR resources, unfair management issues, unfairness that tends to be in the same category and discrimination, harassment, retaliation, you put those together and that's about 36%, which seems either right or actually low to me. But I love this breakout of unfairness and management issues because I think that it gives you such insight into culture. When you group HR as one big thing, you don't really get the sensibility that, you know, my manager is being a jerk, my culture is toxic. That's a really specific thing that you're calling out individually. And I think that people who can track that year on year, it's gonna be hugely beneficial to them as an adjunct to their culture survey to give them a much stronger indication of what is actually going on. Nick : Yeah. That's a great point. Gio, anything to add there? Gio : Yeah. I think Kristy is hitting it on the head there that I think if you're in a Compliance 1.0 environment, you might look at these and say, "Hey, that's not my problem. There's no regulation that says that, you know, managers can't be jerks." But if you're moving through Compliance 2.0 to Compliance 3.0, where you understand that all of these things impact, you know, how much people trust the compliance team, how much people think that they're likely to get retaliated against, what they're, you know, propensity to be part of a speak up, listen up culture is. Those things that maybe, you know, have not been codified by Congress that they're, like, auditing you to make sure that no one's a jerk, those things really drive your compliance culture and drive whether people are gonna participate in this thing called ethics and integrity. And those are great things to, you know, really have an eye on and be able to dig deeper into. You know, there are challenges with data clarity and, you know, your capacity and things like that. And obviously, if you have burning fires, you have to take care of those. But if you're on this benchmark webinar, you're probably the type of person that wants to be in a continuous improvement environment, and you're looking for ways to be better, not ways to just check the box and say, "All right, well, we're probably not gonna be thrown in jail for this." If you're looking to kind of move past those kind of base cold requirements, these are great places to look for improvement. I think outside of that, we can have some discussions around these other categories, but there wasn't a lot of kind of action in where these things were other than the privacy and InfoSec piece, which I think we've all seen concerns around cybersecurity and phishing attacks and all of that ransomware and all of that go up over the past few years. So, not surprising. I think that would just note for our leaders here that, you know, there is an increasing need and demand and pull for you to collaborate with whoever is in your CIO office because those things are all of our problems. Nick : Yeah. They're all of our problems, and I think what's interesting is how that jumped in the work from home environment, which I know we'll talk about some more later. The thing I would add to this conversation about the categories is really that, you know, everyone's categories are a little bit different. You know, tying those categories on your issue intake and in your case management system back to the thing that is the sort of source of truth, which in most cases, is your code of conduct, having consistent categories across and especially if you can map those back to trainings, that can get you that flywheel going, so you can see which areas need improvement, which areas you might need to double down on, or what might be some hot zones. At the end of the day, I think you need to be able to make your categories work for you on two levels. One, there should be some representation of what you care about tracking. And on another level, as categories change over time, it's a best practice to go back across your case management system and make sure that you're updating those so that as you're pulling analytics out on a longitudinal basis, you can see how particular things have changed. So, maybe you used to have discrimination in one category and harassment on a different category and this year, you turned them into one collective discrimination and harassment. Well, go ahead and go back and try to change all of those historical categories and combine those things so that when you pull out, you know, your reports, you can actually show how those fluctuations have changed over time. Gio : That's great. Nick : Okay. Let's talk about this. Oh, and we were talking a little bit about, in the pre-show, Kristy, we were talking about retaliation. And you came up with this really great idea about categorization from a primary or secondary basis about retaliation. Why don't you share that with us now? Kristy : I think that it's just really important to be paying attention to when you're following up with people and if they are feeling retaliation. Some people have actually, like, created a separate category for that, which can help you understand whether or not this is happening and to be able to track it more closely. If you're doing proactive tracking, then you can also have this reactive tracking. It can be really useful. Nick : Yeah. So, just having a secondary category or an additional category for these kinds of things, particularly in the context of an anti-retaliation campaign that you might be driving forward in order to, you know, drive more speak up inside your organization can be a great little hack to drive that forward. So, a lot of what we're talking about, in general, is the role that ethics and compliance can play in, you know, showing its value in the organization. I think we've all seen over the last couple of years, especially over the last year as the Great Resignation has really taken hold of our economy, that so many people are changing jobs because they don't feel engaged at all. And what this is supposed to show you is that every single organization is... So, this is some, like, hardcore econ modeling. I'm an old econ nerd as some of you may know. The point of this thing, to show you, is that this triangle, this light blue triangle in the mix here, exists in every single organization where there's someone giving less than 100% effort, which is probably every single organization. So, if you think about the level of disengagement, which across the economy has been shown to be about, I think in the United States, it's at 68% and 65%, you know, globally, this exists all over the place. And there's, Kristy, I think you brought up an interesting other data point on sort of the cost of disengagement. Kristy : Yeah. So, I was looking at a Gallup survey and the disengaged employee is incredible. It's 37% more absenteeism, 18% lower productivity, and 15% lower profitability for that employee, which means that as a whole, each disengaged employee is 34% less beneficial. And if you put that into real terms for every $10,000, that's $3,400 of loss, which is massive, massive amount of money. Nick : So, you're paying somebody $100 grand, you're losing... Kristy : $34,000. Nick : ...$34,000 is being... It's a silent killer to the bottom line. So, why do you care about this? Well, you care about this because if you think about what the root cause of disengagement is, and Gio, you and I have talked about this a lot, talk to us a little bit about the root cause of disengagement and how that feeds into this speak up conversation that we're in today. Gio : Well, I mean it's a few different things. Like, to me, it ultimately comes down to hope. It comes down to trust. It comes down to is it worth me putting in this effort. And if you don't have any trust in your organization, then you're not gonna put in the extra effort, because maybe it won't go recognized or maybe you'll do it and someone else will get the credit or whatever it is. If you don't trust the organization you're with, and you could zoom that out to the logo in, you know, the employee brand or you can zoom that into the manager and the person with sharp elbows sitting next to me. But if you don't trust that your work is gonna lead to results because it's not gonna be recognized, you're gonna be retaliated against, something's gonna be held against you because of some, you know, identity that you have or something like that, well, then