Compliance Perspectives

By Adam Turteltaub

More and more organizations seem to be adopting compliance ambassadors or champions programs. In a nutshell, these efforts involve having members of the business unit serve as the eyes and ears, and sometimes arms and legs, of the compliance office.

Guillem Casoliva Cabana (LinkedIn), Compliance Manager, Training & Education, at Booking.com shares his insights on the topic in this podcast. The company’s ambassadors program began over 10 years ago.

Recruiting and training ambassadors is a critical part of the process at Booking.com. They are not nominated by their managers. Instead, all are individuals who volunteered to take on the role. At times, it can even be competitive. If more than one person in a given unit volunteers, there is a vote taken in the unit to make the selection.

The onboarding process includes seven distinct steps, including a live session with the compliance and ethics team that goes deep into the scenarios that they may face. Experienced ambassadors serve as mentors to newer ones. And, on an ongoing basis, ambassadors are supported through in-person meetings, an online portal, newsletter and quarterly webinars.

The program’s durability is a reflection of how successful it has been. The ambassadors have helped support the ethical tone of the company, served as examples of the company’s values and proven to be a cost-effective means of embedding compliance without adding to headcount.

Listen in to learn more about how the program has worked and what you need to do to start a successful ambassadors effort of your own.

By Adam Turteltaub

While many would say that you couldn’t pay them enough to take a job in compliance, managers often feel as if compliance officers are being paid too much. So how do you get what you deserve?

In this podcast, and at the 2023 SCCE Compliance & Ethics Institute, Amii Barnard-Bahn, Partner, Kaplan & Walker and Melanie Sponholz, Chief Compliance Officer, Waud Capital Partners, take on this touchy subject.

Before asking for more money, they advise doing your homework. Take the time to talk to peers and recruiters to see what the market rate is. Also, know your employer’s compensation system. Do they tend to pay at the top, bottom or middle of the range. You can also check the SCCE or HCCA compensation survey and sites like Glassdoor and Indeed.

When you do meet with your manager or leadership, go in knowing that this is a difficult conversation for them as well as for you. Do your best to keep things professional. Focus on why the increase in compensation is beneficial for them and not just for you. Spell out what contributions you have and will be making. Above all, be realistic and don’t go in angry.

Want to know more? Listen in to learn how to make the conversation successful, what to do if it isn’t, and how to ask for more compensation or a changed title when your role is expanded. And, don’t forget to attend their session at the 2023 Compliance & Ethics Institute.

By Adam Turteltaub

When an employee announces a departure to another job, there is a temptation to think that it was for more money. That’s probably a mistake, says Mike Lifshotz (LinkedIn), founder and CEO of Hatch Compliance. The new position may pay better, but employees are more likely to depart due to issues such as work/life balance, room for advancement, greater challenges, lack of appreciation and what they perceive to be a bad culture.

To get them to stay, he advises, first and foremost demonstrate respect. That should begin with the hiring process, during which you should both lay out your expectations for the candidate and what they should expect from you.

The organization’s values are particularly important in this regard. They are integral to setting expectations and need to be communicated from the onboarding process and on an ongoing basis.

Be sure to keep the communication process going in general. Employees cannot be expected to trust their managers if the managers don’t take the time to know them.

From a compliance perspective, knowing employees and their personalities can help identify when something is wrong and help you act accordingly.

Compliance can also help with employee retention by providing a safe place for workers to share their concerns without fear of retaliation.

One last piece of advice he offers: take the time to survey the workforce regularly. Use the survey both to measure the culture and as a way to demonstrate that the organization is willing to listen. Then, act on the results.

Listen in to learn more about how to manage the challenging issue of employee retention.

By Adam Turteltaub

Regina Gurvich, Chief Compliance & Risk Officer for Omni Opthalmic Management Consultants knows from first-hand experience that it’s not always easy for compliance officers to stay motivated. There is often a strong headwind, and sometimes a brick wall.

To stay motivated she advises focusing on getting your voice heard, staying true to yourself and finding enjoyment in what you to do a daily basis. For her, that begins with clinging to her idealism and the belief that few people wake up in the morning looking to do the wrong thing.

Focus, she advises, on the fact that for many people the right thing just isn’t clear enough.  Think about ways to educate them and look to do so on a continuous basis. Encourage them not to just know what the law is but understand what it means and how to operationalize it.

Also, grab onto your natural curiosity. Take the time to learn as much as you can about the business and how people go about doing their jobs. Understand where the money comes from and where it goes. That’s more important than ever over the last five to ten years, especially in healthcare.

Then, as you work with others on putting compliance controls in place and seek solutions for a problem, be willing to negotiate and don’t lose your sense of humor.

Listen in to learn more about how to make the day go a bit better.

By Adam Turteltaub

ChatGPT is, like the movie title, seemingly everywhere, all the time, and all at once. Individuals and corporations have rushed to embrace it, sometimes with great results, other times, not so much.

For better or worse, ChatGPT and other AI-driven solutions are here to stay, and with it comes a host of new risks to manage. In this podcast, Lauren Kornutick, Director Analyst, Legal and Compliance at Gartner shares the findings of recent research the firm conducted on ChatGPT.

They found several risks for compliance teams to focus on:

Fabricated and inaccurate answers. As with the case of the lawyer linked to above, ChatGPT sometimes make things up because it was trained on inaccurate material of it was unable to understand the context of the question.

IP Risks. Employees may not understand that once data is put into an open source tool it becomes part of the public domain. That means more training on how to protect IP in the new AI era.

Often the data set used to train the AI relies on data that is biased. A human review is absolutely essential to ensure that existing biases aren’t furthered.

Fraudsters are particularly adept at finding nefarious uses for new technology.

Consumer Protection. Some states require that it be made clear when consumers are interacting with a person, and when they are interacting with a bot. The FTC has also stressed that AI needs to be transparent, accountable and empirically correct.

Listen in to learn more about how to protect your organization from the risks of ChatGPT. Be sure, too, to check out the press release. Gartner subscribers can learn more detail by accessing “What Legal and Compliance Leaders Need to Know About Large Language Model Risks."

By Adam Turteltaub

For the cynical, business ethics, itself, is a myth. For those of us in the profession, we know it is not.

Still, that doesn’t mean that certain urban myths don’t arise. Matej Drascek (LinkedIn), in this provocative podcast, and in an article from Compliance and Ethics Professional® (CEP) magazine, argues that there are, in fact, a number of them. They are:

Myth 1: The code of conduct supports ethical behavior.

Myth 2: The compliance program helps the organization become more ethical.

Myth 3: Whistleblowing tools reduce the risk of unethical behavior.

Myth 4: More training in ethics is better.

Myth 5: Individual “unethical” characters can be curbed with the right controls.

Myth 6: Goals related to ethics or compliance help people behave more ethically.

Sound more like truths than myths? As you will hear, his comments are more warnings about the complacency traps that can arise. For example, we may think a code of conduct is helpful, but if it’s read once and then forgotten, it’s not. Or, just because there’s a whistleblower line doesn’t mean it will be used; the fear of retaliation may keep an employee from reaching out.

Listen in to learn the subtle nuances. If you don’t, your ears will fall off. Okay, maybe that’s Myth 7.

By Adam Turteltaub

The excitement over Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often met with concerns about its negative potential. That’s especially true in healthcare where the potential gains are met by the principled and practical requirements of protecting patient data.

Anitha Vittal, Head, Risk and Compliance, Providence Global Center in India tackles the topic head on in this podcast. She sees AI as having great potential to revolutionize research, diagnosis and treatment, if we can successfully create guardrails for its responsible use.

To do so, she recommends focusing on the risks. The big ones are:

Data protection and security. AI requires huge amounts of data, which raises potential privacy concerns.

If the data is biased, then the output will be as well.

Transparency and Accountability. It can be very difficult to understand AI systems. That’s why it’s essential to bring transparency and accountability into the process.

Compliance teams also need to be educators, helping the AI team and businesspeople understand the ethical considerations involved. One potential technique involves creating case studies and requiring participants to play different roles to better understand perspectives and risks.

Listen in to learn more about managing the  opportunities and risks of AI, including the importance of what she calls the Four E’s: Establish, Embed, Enforce and Evolve.

By Adam Turteltaub

Stephen Paskoff, the President and CEO of ELI, believes that we need to think about compliance training differently.  Instead of it being about communicating information, it needs to be about cultivating a culture of compliance and activating organizational values.

So how do we get there? He recommends focusing on education designed to be retained and applied by the learner. To do that you need to be clear not on just what the standards are but also why they are important.

As importantly, the training can’t stand alone. It has to be linked to broader initiatives and relevant to employees. Even if employees don’t get every nuance of the law or regulation, they have to have a sense of what is right and wrong and be reassured that they will be welcomed if they speak up and raise a concern.

Getting to that point requires making compliance as normal a part of the dialog as discussing sales, manufacturing and other issues. Organizations need to stop treating compliance as something separate and apart and more of a norm of doing business.

That begins with the CEO and leadership team treating it that way. It also means knowing what the barriers are and implementing programs to overcome them.

Listen in to learn more about how to improve your compliance training, including the five C’s and how they can help.

By Adam Turteltaub

Our colleagues expect to be treated like adults, and that should include the compliance training we assign them.

CJ Wolf, a professor at Brigham Young University-Idaho and founder of Codermedschool.com, explains we need to embrace adult learning theory, which recognizes that adults learn differently than children. Making mistakes, for example, is particularly powerful. Good compliance training, consequently, should be less about telling them what they need to know and more about providing them with an opportunity to work through scenarios and make their errors in a safe classroom setting rather than out in the real world.

He shares a host of similar good advice in this podcast and in the SCCE Creating Effective Compliance Training Workshop.

Click below to hear other do’s and don’ts to make your training more relevant:

Do assess the effectiveness of the training. Be sure to include testing.

Don’t assess the effectiveness just once. See what employees remember several months later.

Don’t overload new employees on the first day. A lot of departments are throwing information at them.  Be judicious in terms of what you expect them to tackle right away, and what can wait until later.

Do have a training plan based on your organization’s risk.

Don’t give everyone the same training. Tailor based on their needs.

Want to know more? Think about joining him for the Creating Effective Compliance Training Workshop.

By Adam Turteltaub

Contract lifecycle management has grown to be an increasingly critical issue for healthcare providers. Staffing issues, shrinking margins and changing regulatory requirements are all adding to the challenge, report David Paschall, CEO, and Stephanie Haywood, SVP of Sales and Client Engagement at Ntracts.

Pursuing a contract lifecycle management strategy, they report, can help alleviate these issues by reducing the number of days a contract spends being reviewed, increase transparency and help the organization adopt standardized language and processes to ensure greater adherence to internal policies.

It can also reduce the number of contracts that get auto renewed by mistake, are not renewed when they should be or overlap needlessly with other agreements.

Listen in to learn more about how adopting a contract lifecycle management strategy can bring greater efficiency and a host of other benefits to your organization.