Your company opens a second office, hundreds of miles away from the original one, with a skeleton crew of ten employees.
No room – and no need – in that new office for a finance person, or a lawyer, or an HR partner.
But you know what that new office could use? A part-time ethics ambassador.
One of these ten employees should act as a liaison between the mothership’s control functions and the new satellite office. Someone to keep the information flowing in both directions. Someone who is responsible for sharing new policies and reminding colleagues to complete their training. Someone who can bring back allegations and concerns to the main office.
If your ethics and compliance function is centralized at headquarters, consider creating a network of ethics ambassadors that are deployed everywhere you do business. My company has nearly 300 of them, and our company is stronger because of that team.
If you’d like to learn how to create such a network, I will be part of a panel of speakers addressing this very topic during an ECI event on June 23.
Hope to see you there!
Writing as “The Ethical Leader,” Yan Tougas draws on 15 years of experience as a compliance & ethics officer at a Fortune 500 company, sharing insights, wisdom and lessons learned. This post originally…
