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A RopesTalk podcast series—a collaboration between Ropes & Gray's Insights Lab and Front-Line Anti-Bribery—focused on the data and behavioral sciences approach to risk management.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Hi, I’m Nitish Upadhyaya, and welcome to an extra-special episode of the Culture & Compliance Chronicles, the podcast that gives you new perspectives on legal, compliance and regulatory challenges faced by organizations and individuals worldwide. This episode finds me on tour, solo, at the Society of Compliance and Ethics’ flagship conference taking place in Grapevine, Texas. I wanted to get views from across the compliance, risk and audit community about culture, how professionals are seeing culture manifest in their work and what they’re doing to ensure programs are culturally informed. It’s a big topic on this podcast, and I wanted to really go into the wild on this. I’ve met some amazing people here at the conference, from seasoned speakers to folks who are just starting out on their compliance journey. Let’s see if their ideas can pique your curiosity and get you to test some of your own perceptions. Take what follows as space to think differently about some of the challenges you’re facing in your day-to-day work.
First, I wanted to get a baseline and understand how folks define culture. For regular listeners, you’ll know that we define culture as patterns. It helps remind us that culture is ever-changing, but it also gives us a way to map and interact with culture. The definitions vary, and of course, those definitions influence how organization and individuals engage with culture in the compliance space. So, let’s dive in.
Krista Wolff: I am Krista Wolff, and my role is employee engagement and education for Agilent Technologies. Culture, I don’t know how to define it, but I know a good one when I see it, and I know a bad one when I see it. It’s everything around you. It’s how you feel. It’s how everyone else feels. It’s this vibe that you can feel in the air, and when it’s not good, it takes a lot of work to get back to a good spot. But when it’s good, everything fits, it feels right. It’s everyone working together heading in the right direction. Nobody’s going upstream, and it just works.
Brooke Hopkins: I’m Brooke Hopkins, managing director at Alvarez & Marsal. I think culture is the DNA of a company. I think, similar to genetics, it’s often passed down from the parent, and so, you see culture develop from the top down—and genes pass down. That tone at the top we hear so often about really helps to define a company’s culture. It becomes ingrained in who the company is, so ultimately, the DNA.
Nitish Upadhyaya: So, we’ve had this vibe that you can feel in the air. It gets at the abstract, sometimes amorphous view of culture. It’s there but it’s really hard to put your finger on. But it does affect things. And then, Brooke talked about it being the DNA of the company and things being passed down. That’s something we see a lot as well. Things that have happened years ago, the way in which the company was previously run, still having ripples with the culture of the modern-day organization. Let’s keep going and hear some more ideas.
Adam Turteltaub: This is Adam Turteltaub, chief engagement and strategy officer from the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) and Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA). I think the best definition is the common one for what is culture/how do you define it: “It’s just the way we do things around here.” I think one of the things that’s important to recognize about it is it’s both the big and the little things. It’s everything from the big things of, “Do we take risks? Do we think the law is meaningless or what we strictly adhere to?” down to “What time do we eat lunch? And does ‘business casual’ mean khakis and a shirt, or does it mean a suit and no tie?” So, culture’s one of those things that’s so ubiquitous and really infuses everything people do.
Kortney Nordrum: I’m Kortney Nordrum, Deluxe Corporation—I’m the VP, regulatory counsel and chief compliance officer. I would define culture as the mores and norms of a group of people that are passed down generation to generation without anyone really realizing it. You inherit it, and then you pass it along as you go, for both good and bad.
Eduardo Andrade: Hi, I’m Eduardo Andrade—I’m an adjunct professor of corporate ethics and compliance at Fordham University Law School. Culture for me is norms, mythology, and of course that old adage of how things are really done at an organization.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Adam talked about the way we do things around here, and then we got a little bit deeper into some of the facets. Kortney focused on the norms of a group, and Eduardo tackled something that I think is important, mythology—the stories and adages that people tell about what it’s like to work in the place. That narrative often ends up becoming what it’s like to work there, how people make decisions, and it drives behaviors and attitudes. So, I think as I was expecting, there are lots of different definitions for culture, and these ultimately shape our views to how we approach them. Now, having heard about the various definitions, I wanted to understand how folks are seeing culture manifest in their compliance work. I keep saying it’s pervasive and encompassing and that you can’t tackle a compliance challenge without considering culture. But what did people at the conference think? Let’s hear Adam Turteltaub.
Adam Turteltaub: When it comes to where we see culture coming up in the world of ethics and compliance, I think it comes up in virtually every discussion—not risk-specific. When it comes to a risk area specific thing, people tend to focus on that, but when it comes to everything from the code of conduct to training to tone at the top, culture infuses all of that, because it’s one of those things that has an enormous impact on how people go about doing things and what they’re going to be hearing when you’re saying something. For example, some people have said if somebody comes from a culture where compliance was just lip service and now, they’ve entered your organization with a strong ethics and compliance organizational culture, they may still think of compliance and ethics as just a joke. And so, those are things I think you have to keep in mind.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Now, let’s get Brooke Hopkins’s take on it.
Brooke Hopkins: I see culture come up quite often during forensic investigations as well as monitorships. I think it really becomes a focus area with companies that have repeat violations, and it’s tricky because to address culture, you typically have to start at the top with a company, and sometimes there’s a blindness to what needs to change. Behavior is a hard thing to address, especially with company executives, because you’re getting into the psychology of things. If a company thinks that’s too soft, “We’re performing well—we’re profitable,” they might ignore that. And it’s of no surprise to me when I see those same companies back in the headlines or perhaps as my client, because they haven’t addressed the culture issues, which are so often root causes to the problems they have with the violations.
Nitish Upadhyaya: I think Brooke’s point is a really interesting one: the idea that culture is a really important point to consider when you’re preventing recidivism. The idea that even if you’ve got your standard toolkit, your policies, your trainings, your procedures, if you’re not really understanding and diagnosing the cultural elements that gave rise to misconduct, then the likelihood is you’re going to be back here again and again and again. And Adam’s point around the fact that culture infuses everything is a really important mindset. There are cultural elements to how you draft your policies and procedures, how people interpret them across geographies, for example. Thinking, as Adam said, about people coming into your organization from a different risk level, a different way of doing things, and integrating and onboarding them into the way things are done around here is also incredibly important. Now, let’s have some new voices.
Shannon Jamison: My name is Shannon Jamison—I am the AVP and global compliance operations leader at Agilent Technologies. Where I see culture impacting our work in compliance is changing the narrative of how we present compliance to the organization. Whereas they were in a culture where compliance was a no function, and we having been at the organization for the last three to four years have really been changing that perception of compliance, and I think that the culture has received us well.
Luciane Mallmann: My name is Luciane Mallmann—I’m the interim global compliance director for Strada Global. One of the important topics about culture is how you communicate depending on each region across different geographies. How you can tailor your communications into more direct or indirect speech—it’s that there’s no one-size-fits-all. It might be easier to simplify, but at the end of the day, it’s not going to be effective. You need to touch people’s hearts and then get them engaged with ethics compliance.
Andrew McBride: I’m Andrew McBride, chief executive officer for Integrity Bridge and former chief risk and compliance officer for Albemarle. Where we’re seeing culture play out, certainly at my last role, one of the things that we did as part of our broader ethics and compliance program update was to identify those proxies for culture and cultural health that we were able to bring together in a meaningful way for management. Whilst a number of those we were able to pull from the data that compliance maintains, such as investigations and use of our interactive eCode training to take-up, we combined that with data that was managed by other functions such as HR—level of attrition, the number of disciplinary actions, the number of health and safety incidents that we had at a company site—and by combining those different data sets, serving as a proxy for cultural health, we were able to then have very data-rich conversations and allowed management at that local level to identify local remediation opportunities. And so, that kind of representation of culture was often sometimes subtly different at different locations, depending on what the information was that we were being told.
Nitish Upadhyaya: We just heard about culture affecting perceptions of compliance, more generally as activities, but also as the function, and then, from Luciane, about how you need to be human and understand how people are going to interpret things. Then, we moved on to something particularly relevant from Andrew, thinking about how we can use different elements of data as proxies for culture and cultural health, which I know a lot of folks talked about at the conference. Now, this is the conference where the DOJ announced additional measures regarding whistleblowing and speak-up, for example, and so, speak-up culture was on everyone’s mind. How do you understand and get to see indicators of things that are going wrong and also things that are working, even in that specific context? What can you look at?
I think one of the things that was exciting at the conference was that people are starting to look at this from both a quant perspective—retention, number of speak-up reports, all of those things, which are almost easier to do, something that we’re set up to do—but also qual, “What are people saying at exit interviews about how comfortable they were about speaking up?” Speaking up might not just be the big things that we’re talking about regarding bribery, corruption, harassment—it may also just be how you felt about raising things from an innovation context, from a risk-taking context. As Andrew described, all of those aspects are incredibly important in triangulating what’s going on. And the stories that people are telling about the organization often give you the “whys” and “hows” behind the “what” that you see in the quant data. Now, let’s flip back to Kortney.
Kortney Nordrum: In my day-to-day life, I see culture come up literally everywhere. Everything we do as compliance professionals touches culture, both how do we communicate to others what compliance is, how they can be compliant, what the rules are, as well as on the enforcement side. When you’re fixing a problem, when you’re finding a problem, what culturally caused this problem? What caused someone to not report it? What caused someone to report it? All of that is all about the culture that you’ve got ingrained in your organization. Everything we do, everything we see, and everything we work on has culture woven through it, and that’s either good or bad.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Here’s Luciane again on cultural differences between geographies.
Luciane Mallmann: People have different perceptions. For example, even if you want to give feedback if you’re leading a team—if I give feedback for people in the U.K. (native people), I’m not going to take the same approach if I need to give feedback to people from Brazil or to people in France maybe. So, I’m trying to learn a little bit more how to do that, because people can get the message in a different way. In Brazil, for example, if you’re going to give feedback, you’re going to go more straight to the point, and then, maybe can talk about positive things at the end. But then, in the U.K., for example, you start to set the scene, focus on the positive side, and then it’s all about perception, it’s about the culture. People in Brazil, they’re not going to perceive that as a bad thing if you go straight to the point and give them more constructive feedback at the beginning and then you leave the positive insights and comments for the end.
Nitish Upadhyaya: And rounding us off is Eduardo.
Eduardo Andrade: It is so critical—it impacts every element of a compliance program. It, of course, can undo or enhance at any aspect of a compliance program. To me, it’s utterly foundational. You can do the most wonderful things with your program, but if you don’t really have a good culture—hopefully that you live true to your values and one of them is integrity, or if that’s missing—it’s going to be such an uphill battle. You’re going to probably have to just be on the compliance side of prevent, detect and remediate, as opposed to really building a culture of compliance. That’s the other part of what is an effective program. Yes, you have to PDR (prevent, detect and respond), but you have to build a culture of compliance.
Nitish Upadhyaya: People are seeing culture come up all across their work, and it’s genuinely impacting it. We had everyone’s definitions, and now we heard about where it makes a difference from thinking about misconduct and it not happening again to how you communicate in multicultural and multigeographical organizations, and then, also how it affects the day-to-day about perceptions of compliance. Those issues all come down to culture, and it seems that people are interacting and trying to do what they can to wrap their heads around a really complex subject. So, I got curious about how compliance professionals are engaging with culture. This is the most interesting piece for me: learning about what works and what doesn’t, what people are trying and where they are seeing some measure of success, or where things are being innovative and we’re seeing potential progress. We have Adam giving his take.
Adam Turteltaub: I think part of my view on what people are doing on culture is shaped by the fact that I’ve been working in the realm of compliance and ethics for almost 24 years now. I think the biggest change is, nobody really talked that much about culture—it was all tone-at-the-top conversations, because that was in the sentencing guidelines. But the idea of creating a culture of compliance, a culture of ethics has grown enormously, especially over the last five years as people started realizing more and more that you can have all the elements of a compliance program in place but if your culture is one that doesn’t support it, you’re really not going to make much progress.
Andrew McBride: Looking to the future of what’s really interesting me from an assessment of cultural health within companies, I do think that the opportunity to be collating more data whilst respecting data privacy considerations potentially using artificial intelligence to draw more from that and to facilitate more engagement with management about why that happens is something that is of interest to me. I think what would be even more interesting is if you’ve got sufficient levels of data coming in that it can be turning from a retrospective look at what’s been happening to more of a predictive look. Can you generate enough data insights that it can actually start to predict where you may have some hot spots in terms of cultural health?
Nitish Upadhyaya: And here’s Kortney Nordrum.
Kortney Nordrum: Novel ways I’m seeing culture being used are, I think, through communication and a lot of DEI and belonging efforts. In the last few years, there’s been a real push to understand humans where they are, employees where they are, people where they are, and to go to them instead of making them come to you. So, instead of pushing information out, it’s a push and a pull, and you actually get better interaction. We’re seeing more talking about not only diversity but inclusion of neurodivergent folks.
Krista Muszak: I’m Krista Muszak—I work for Pfizer. My training this morning was about unicorns and dinosaur trainings/education. Culturally, compliance professionals are not known for having a really big sense of humor, but here we did. We opened our session dressed in a big inflatable dinosaur costume and a big inflatable unicorn costume. We had a dance party right before the session started. That is a way that can be a new culture for us. We don’t have to be gray scale dinosaurs. We can be fun, we can be approachable, and that can be our new culture.
Nitish Upadhyaya: We’ve heard our impromptu guests cover all sorts of initiatives which help them engage with organizational culture. Even just talking about culture is a starting place for some folks, and that’s a big development from maybe just previous focuses on tone from the top, which is just one of many contributors to overall culture. Using data often seemingly quant but starting to move towards qual to get a handle on culture is another. Now, you’re never going to map the entirety of the complex landscape, but you can try to understand the patterns and then move those in one direction or another—less of this, more of that. In my head, I find myself assigning each discussion to the framework we use from cultural psychology, which keeps us honest in terms of making sure we’re engaging with the complexity of culture. It isn’t just one facet. These are the four Is—ideas, institutions, interactions and individuals—and we’ve heard parts of each in this episode. I love Krista’s point at the end. This can be an intensely fun and human experience, and I genuinely do think that this is the secret to creative approaches that lead to change and sustainable change.
I hope you found yourself nodding along or surprised, or maybe you’re challenging some of the ideas that came up today. Hopefully, somewhere along the way, you learned something new. And I’m intrigued. Ask yourself the question, “Where can you see culture affecting your own work? How are you embedding an appreciation of organizational culture into new initiatives, or where can you?” If you haven’t thought about this before, has this episode made you think differently?
Thank you to all of our guests today for suspending their disbelief when I approached them, for allowing me to use a mic to record our conversation in culture. Everywhere from the side of the exhibitors’ stall to the registration desk, everyone was really excited to give their opinion. But remember, these are just some opinions from a conference, and there are so many ideas and thoughts out there, but here’s a start to airing that discussion. We’re releasing pretty much a week after the conference, and that wouldn’t have been possible without our amazing podcast editing team, so thank you, Eric Gaudet and Jeremy Miller, for all your hard work in turning this around for our listeners. And, to you, our listeners, thanks for tuning in. Let us have some feedback—this is an entirely new episode where we’re trying something different. Maybe it’s worked, maybe it hasn’t, but I do hope you’ll be back and join me, Amanda and Richard for our next episode coming very soon on the Culture & Compliance Chronicles.