Interests

Nepotism – the most powerful conflict of all?

In 1973, in speaking to colleagues on the  Cook County Democratic Committee, Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago defended his having directed a million dollars of insurance business to an agency on behalf of his son John with the immortal words: “If I can’t help my sons, then [my critics] can kiss my ass. I make no apologies to anyone.”

This analysis aside, nepotism can be a tricky subject to address.  There are, of course, countless instances of nepotism being good for business, as recounted in this 2009 article in Forbes.  Moreover, not all cultures view nepotism-related issues through a Western lens, as described in this earlier post by Lori Tansey Martens:   “I remember conducting an ethics workshop for a major multinational company in Africa. We presented a conflict of interest scenario about hiring a brother-in-law as a supplier, but the participants were aghast at the ‘correct’ answer, which was not to hire the family member’s firm.  ‘It is unethical for me NOT to hire my brother-in- law if he is qualified – and he will do a better job for my company because he is my brother, and therefore more accountable to me,’ said one participant, summarizing the feelings of the entire group.”   Additionally, irrespective of this economic analysis (family ties as promoting accountability), nepotism surely has its roots in evolution – as reflected in loyalty being one of the six universal moral foundations identified in Jonathan Haidt’s landmark book, The Righteous Mind.   Finally, as noted in the Forbes piece, there is no broad legal prohibition against nepotism.  In many settings, it is perfectly legal.

On the other hand, it is not always legal, as (among other things) family members have played significant roles as the vehicles of corruption in FCPA prosecutions, as recounted in this piece in the FCPA Blog.  Indeed, the World Bank has identified nepotism itself as a form of corruption.  Moreover, precisely because of its deep origins in our evolutionary past, nepotism may be the most potent conflict of interest of all.   There are, after all, many things we would do for our children that we wouldn’t do for ourselves.  In a test of strength it is a good bet that family ties will overwhelm those born of less deep-seated fiduciary duties.

Additionally, the harm caused by nepotism is not limited to sub-standard job performance by family members.  It can, I believe, also imperil the sense of organizational justice that serves as the foundation for any ethical culture.  As described in this earlier post (about organizational justice and COIs generally):     “The special harm that COIs can cause to organizational justice arises from their frequently personal nature: because COIs often involve a personal benefit to an individual employee that is denied to others, the latter (i.e., rule abiding employees) can feel personally harmed (from a relative perspective) by the COI in a way that they would not feel, for example, with an antitrust offense or violation of export regulations.” More specifically, the very reasons that make nepotism appealing to the beneficiaries of the practice may make it loathsome to others – i.e., those who don’t share in its benefits –  and this, in turn, can undermine the ethical performance of an organization generally.

Finally, I should stress that I don’t mean to suggest by the way I ordered this post that the nays always have it when it comes to nepotism.  Indeed, consistent with this blog’s focus on “moral hazard”, I find the above-described accountability argument to be intriguing – at least enough to make it worth exploring further.  The point  of this post  is merely that - at least for some business organizations  - nepotism should be a topic for soul searching, and for carrying the ethical analysis further than the late mayor did.

Conflicts of interest based on prior employment: law, ethics and some interesting cases

Within the world of conflicts, those arising from prior employment relationships occupy a particularly significant territory.  (Indeed, one of the most notable COI cases of this – still young – year concerns the former head of a pension system helping a fund manager get business from the system.)    In today’s post, I briefly explore different aspects of this part of the COI map.

First, the most consequential forms of conflicts based on previous employment tend to involve public-to-private sector transitions (as in the above-mentioned pension case), and here the relevant standards are generally defined by law.  At least in the U.S., the rules for such transitions can be fairly restrictive, as reflected in this 2009 memorandum from the Gibson Dunn law firm relating to employees of the federal executive branch  and also in this discussion of relevant  state law on the UCLA web site.  Government employees and those who would hire them need to be very mindful of these rules and the latter should build into their hiring processes rigorous means for ensuring compliance.

Second, in terms of purely private sector employment transitions, restrictions of the above  sort are less universal – and tend to be the domain of internal policy, rather than law.  Here (on page 24) is a good example of one such approach  from the Verizon Wireless code.  Based on what I’ve seen over the years, this is an area where many companies have room to improve.

Finally, there are other  less common  COI-related employment transitions for which the  inquiry goes beyond law or internal policy to something else –  an ethical concern, with an element of public policy, perhaps.  While difficult to define using current COI categories, these cases tend to be among the most interesting of the lot.

For instance, late last month, as reported in the Guardian,  a report issued by the public accounts committee of the House of Commons in the UK charged that Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers “are using knowledge gained from staff seconded to the Treasury to help wealthy clients avoid paying UK taxes… [the firms provided] the government with expert accountants to draw up tax laws [but]  went on to advise multinationals and individuals on how to exploit loopholes around legislation they had helped to write… Margaret Hodge, the [committee’s] chair, said the actions of the accountancy firms were tantamount to a scam and represented a ‘ridiculous conflict of interest’ which must be stopped.” Note that for various reasons (some of which are laid out in the Guardian piece) this doesn’t sound like a black-and-white issue to me, but it is indeed worrisome.  And given the importance – not just in the UK, but pretty much everywhere -  of enhancing the fairness and efficiency of tax systems, I imagine that it is the sort of issue that we’ll be hearing about more in the years ahead.

Finally, there is the story from earlier this year about Treasury Secretary Jack Lew having received a $685,000 severance payment when he left an administrative post at NYU for one at Citibank, which he subsequently left to return to government work  – at which time he also got a bonus from Citibank.  While the latter payment was contractually mandated, the former one was not and, as noted in this article,  was “considered unusual by outside experts in benefits and raises questions about why a tax-exempt university would give a large exit bonus to an executive who was departing voluntarily.”

In light of the chronology, Lew was presumably not being paid by NYU to influence his exercise of specific duties as a government employee  – and so this cannot be called a COI in the traditional sense.   But it is also hard to see the severance as the school simply rewarding an employee for a job well done  – especially since, in addition to a large salary, he also received a loan forgiveness valued at about $440,000. Moreover, given the path of his career  (most of which was spent in public service, including holding some powerful posts)  it doubtless seemed likely at the time he left NYU that he would at some point return to government in a high ranking position.

So in terms of where the Lew matter fits on our “map,” it may be most accurate to say that it has the spirit – if not the actual form – of a conflict of interest (although perhaps it could be called a COI “on spec”).   But - along with other such cases - it may suggest a need to look at the adequacy of our current understanding of what a COI is, and consider redrawing the boundaries of what is out of bounds along the lines of common ethical sense.

How does your compliance and ethics program deal with “conformity bias”?

In his blog on the Ethics Unwrapped website published by the University of Texas’ McCombs School of Business,  Prof. Robert Prentice reviews some important recent research on the behavioralist phenomenon of “conformity bias” – “the tendency of people to take their cues as to the proper way to think and act from those around them.”  As he describes, in one experiment conducted by Francesca Gino, “students were more likely to cheat when they learned that members of their ‘in-group’ did so, but less likely when learning the same about members of a rival group.”  In a related vein, a study by Scott A. Wright, John B. Dinsmore and James J. Kellaris showed that the identity of the victim was also influential in forming individuals’ views of cheating – and specifically that “in-group members who scammed other in-group members were judged more harshly than in-group members who scammed out-group members.” (Citations/links to these and other studies on conformity bias can be found in Prentice’s post – which I encourage you to read.)

As with various other behavioral ethics concepts previously reviewed in the COI Blog, the ideas here may seem obvious (“When in Rome…”)  – but being able to prove the points with data could help C&E officers get the attention they need in their companies to deal with conformity bias based ethical challenges.  But even if the leaders in their organizations agree that something should be done about conformity bias, what is that something?

One step in this direction – which potentially covers a lot of ground – is to include a conformity bias perspective in C&E risk assessment. For instance, where, based on the findings of a risk assessment, the victims of a particular type of violation are likely to be seen more as out-group members than in-group ones, that may suggest the need for extra C&E mitigation measures (of various kinds) to address the risk area in question.  Similarly, risk assessment surveys should (as many, but not all, currently do) target regional or business-line based employee populations that may be setting a bad example for other member employees. Additionally, one should – for the purposes of identifying conformity-biased based risks – consider whether for some employee populations the most relevant in-group is defined less by the culture in your organization but rather  by that of members of their industry, as industries (as much as companies or geographies) can have unethical cultures (as suggested most recently in this Wall Street Journal story on the LIBOR manipulation scandal).

More broadly, just as the sufficiency of internal controls (policies, procedures, etc.) need to be assessed in any analysis of risk, so do “inner controls,”   which is another way of thinking about how various behavioral ethics related factors diminish or enhance the risk of C&E violations. That is, the weaker the inner controls (based not only on conformity bias but other risk causing phenomena, behaviorist or otherwise), the greater the need for traditional internal controls.

A second such type of measure – which also is potentially broad – is in the realm of training and communications, and specifically finding ways to highlight the connections employees may have to those who otherwise are likely to be viewed as out-group members.   The good news here, as Prentice writes, is that “[a]mong the most interesting findings in this entire line of research is how little it takes for us to view someone as part of our in-group, or of an out-group.”

At least in theory, this seems to underscore the benefits of a broad “stakeholder” approach of C&E. Ultimately, however, what may be needed here is less the skills of those who draft codes of conduct than of those can reach us on a deeper level regarding how we should really view our “group” membership – as was perhaps most famously done by Charles Dickens.

A pharma cure for moral hazard?

“Moral hazard” – one of the three  principal areas of focus of this blog  – refers to a situation in which there is a disconnect between, on the one hand, those with the capacity and motivation to engage in risky behavior and, on the other, those who will bear the likely negative impact of such risk taking.  Notwithstanding the word “moral” in its name, it is primarily an economic concept – not an ethics-related one.  But anyone familiar with the logic of “heads I win, tails you lose” will see the possible connection to the latter area.

Certainly the government – since the 2004 amendments to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations   – has been mindful of the role of  incentives in promoting or inhibiting C&E.  More recently, its concern has been reflected in the C&E aspects of some settlement agreements, such as the 2012 money laundering related case against HSBC (specifying, in relevant part, that bank policies provide that “the extent to which a senior executive meets the bank’s compliance standards and values has a significant impact on the amount of the senior executive’s bonus”).  Beyond these government-imposed C&E elements, some companies are instituting compensation “clawback provisions” involving wrongdoing by executives – including, as described in this recent post, Barclays.

The latest news on this front comes from the Wall Street Journal, which last week reported:  ”Under pressure from investors, six of the biggest U.S. drug makers [Pfizer, Merck, J&J,  Amgen, Bristol Myers  Squibb and Eli Lilly] are revising their compensation policies to make it easier to recover payouts to an executive who violates ethics rules or otherwise behaves inappropriately. The changes would let the drug makers . . . reclaim compensation from executives whose actions hurt them or their investors, even if the behavior didn’t force a restatement of financial results. The companies also would be able to recover payments to executives who should have stopped bad behavior and to cancel future payouts.”

Note that from a purely economic standpoint, clawbacks  are not an optimal deterrent – as they permit  what is closer to a  “heads I win, tails we tie” calculation than something more truly punitive.  But the recent steps taken by the pharma companies in this regard still represent real progress in the fight against moral hazard – and one hopes that other industries follow this prescription.

A new player in the conflicts of interest pageant

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it” These famous words were uttered by Upton Sinclair long ago but, although his concern was more with politics than the types of conflicts of interest discussed in this blog, its logic is no less applicable to the latter – and no less forceful with the passage of time.  If money can’t always buy people’s souls, it still very frequently affects their understanding and actions. And, in at least one way, the situation may be getting worse.

The pageant of COIs indeed seems endless: lawyers, financial advisors, journalists, economists, medical doctors, auditors, compensation consultants.  (For more on this see the posts collected  in the  Industries and Professions tab on the left hand side of the screen.)  To this list should now be added – dental researchers.

According to story last month in Medscape Today News, a recent published study showed: “Researchers are more likely to report positive results about dental treatments if they get paid by the [companies’] marketing the treatments… In an analysis of 135 randomized clinical trials from leading dental journals, those in which the authors had a conflict of interest were 2.4 times more likely to have positive results, the study shows.”

The article did note the view of a “former editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Dental Association and past president of the [International Association for Dental Research ] … that she is confident existing safeguards will keep the dental literature from being distorted.” On the other hand, one of the study’s authors – University of Toronto researcher Romina Brignardello-Petersen, DDS –  said, “many readers do not know how to assess the evidence critically…To be completely honest, probably it does have a big impact because most people who use the literature are not accustomed to doing critical analysis of it.”

Still, this may be a difficult problem to address.  As also noted by Dr. Brignardello-Petersen, “’unfortunately, it would be very hard to conduct clinical research if there was no sponsorship… . Randomized clinical trials are expensive to conduct, and researchers have a bigger opportunity to conduct research if they work with one of the companies,’”  a factor which is particularly relevant to dentistry  given that government funding for research in that field is “meager.”

Indeed, at a time when government funding for other types of medical research is increasingly in jeopardy, it is scary to contemplate the broader implications of the dental research COI study.  But Sinclair wouldn’t be surprised by any of it.

Moonlighting – legal violations, ethical breaches and good compliance practices

Just in the past few months:

- A police officer was caught allegedly “moonlighting” as a pimp – and was fired.

- An IRS employee with broad supervisory authority (to decide, among other things, which taxpayers were audited) was found to have set up a private tax advisory business – and was charged with a violation of a federal conflicts of interest law.

- A business organization (which was already tainted by a high-profile COI scandal) was discovered to be allowing some of its salaried managers to “moonlight” as hourly workers for the organization – and was publicly embarrassed.

(Also worth noting – but not, in my view, as clearly wrong as the others: a judge in New Jersey is under fire for moonlighting as a stand-up comic.)

Moonlighting has been around for a long time. (For COI history-minded readers, here’s an interesting example involving a 19^th century Chilean general who had a second job — as an agent for an arms contractor that sold to the Chilean military.)   But due to macroeconomic headwinds, relatively pervasive job insecurity and the expansion of telecommuting the practice seems likely to grow in the future (although this is only a guess).

While the cases we read about tend to involve intentional breaches or stunningly bad judgment, moonlighting viewed more generally  can be beneficial, and not only for the moonlighter.  Most obviously, the second employer gets the assistance of an employee that might not otherwise be available to it. Less obviously, the first employer can benefit from the employee’s experience at the second job – although this wouldn’t be a factor in all cases. Still, all involved need to be mindful of relevant C&E issues.

First, if you are employed by a governmental body, know the law, as some violations – such as in the IRS case – are punishable by criminal prosecution. (Here is an overview of relevant federal law  and here is one regarding employment with NY City.)  Similarly, if employed in the private sector, know and follow your company’s moonlighting policy – which is often found in the conflict of interest section of a company code of conduct.

Second, if you are an employer, make sure you in fact have implemented a moonlighting policy – and note that the failure to  have one could, in certain circumstances result in a violation of  state “lawful conduct” statutes.  (I don’t know about laws outside the US on this issue.)

Such policies typically include conflicts-of-interest provisions – barring/restricting employment:

-       with  a competitor company or a firm that does (or seeks to do) business with the organization – like a supplier or customer;

-        in  jobs that might entail use of the organization’s confidential information or commercial relationships; or

-       where the work  could otherwise adversely affect the organization’s image or interests.

Beyond such conflicts, these policies generally provide that a second job shouldn’t interfere with performance of duties required by the first – e.g., by making an employee too tired for the latter or causing her to use time that should be spent on the latter for the benefit of the former.

Third, these policies should be promoted and enforced. They should be the subject of periodic communications – and not just buried in an employment manual that no one reads.  There should also  be a formal process to help ensure that approvals are documented and justified and, from time to time, the company should check to make sure the policies are actually being followed.

Fourth, whether as a matter of practice or policy, the “second company” (i.e., one that is hiring the moonlighting employee), should enquire of applicants if they have received any necessary permissions from their principal employer. I.e., an ethical organization will want to make sure not only that it is free of conflicts of interest internally but that it is not causing conflicts in others.

Finally, for a post on COI issues potentially arising from service on an outside board click here.

Complying with customers’ conflict of interest requirements

A federal indictment handed down this week charged a former CEO of CalPERS (the California Public Employees Retirement System), who had become a consultant to a “placement agent” just one day after leaving CalPERS,  with defrauding Apollo Global Management in connection with Apollo’s payment of  14 million dollars in fees to the placement agent for its role in persuading CalPERS to hire Apollo to manage some of its funds.  As charged in the indictment, Apollo asked the agent to have a CalPERS official sign a letter saying that they were aware of the placement agent’s role in getting Apollo the business, but CalPERSs’ officials – presumably concerned with the conflict of interest involved - refused to do so. So, the former CEO and a colleague at the placement agent allegedly created and presented to Apollo phony letters evidencing such approval.

This is a fairly unusual (as well as tangled) case and apparently leaves open a number of  important questions regarding CapPERS and Apollo.  But it also raises the broader and more general question which countless companies face on a frequent basis:  what should be done to ensure that one’s employees and agents are complying with a customer’s COI standards, (a topic we haven’t explored since the early days of the blog)?

There are a number of possibilities here, including the following:

- Mandating that your company’s employees/agents comply with relevant customer standards, i.e., building such an expectation into your code of conduct, other policies and agency agreements.

- Training and otherwise communicating periodically to at-risk employees and agents on such expectations.

- Making an effort to ensure that employees/agents are in fact aware of applicable customer standards, such as by collecting and distributing relevant sections (e.g., on gifts, entertainment and travel) of customer codes of conduct to employees/agents who deal with such parties.

- Including such standards in one’s audit protocols.

- Contacting the customer with respect to specific contemplated actions that could raise COI  issues under the customer’s policies or relevant law.

The last of these measures is, of course, the most delicate – and it is not something that companies tend to do for small-scale matters (e.g., taking a customer’s employee to lunch).  However, for potentially weightier COI issues it is often warranted (and, of course, should be done where required by law – as was the case in the CapPERS matter).

Finally, it is worth considering that there are different  types of effort that each of the above compliance measures can entail.  For instance, regarding the delicate but potentially important customer-contact-related measure one can require that:

- Written notice be given to the customer (e.g., the supervisor of an employee of a government agency who one would like to invite on a business trip) –  a one-way written communication.

- The customer confirm in writing its approval of the contemplated action (e.g., what Apollo sought to do here) -  a two-way written communication.

- There there be an in-person or telephonic contact with the customer – to avoid the type of fraud that happened in the CalPERs case.

Insider trading, behavioral ethics and effective “inner controls”

Late last week the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it had reached a settlement with a hedge fund involving the largest penalty ever imposed for insider trading. But it is a fair bet that even this record breaking fine will do little to deter future insider trading, because of the unique compliance challenges raised by this area of the law.

One challenge is that insider trading can be enormously difficult to detect.   This is particularly so where the individual misusing the information is neither an insider herself nor tied to one in an obvious way. Insider trading is sometimes described as a “perfect crime” and, sad to say, in many instances it doubtless proves to be just that. (Part of the way we know this is that “numerous academic studies [have] …. [u]ncover[ed] indicators like spikes in a stock’s trading volume just before key information, such as quarterly earnings, is made public…” which suggest that there is a fair bit of insider trading going on -  yet the number of actual prosecutions in this area is relatively low. )

The other challenge  (which is germane to the behavioral ethics aspect of this blog) is that the opportunity for insider trading may fail to trigger the sorts of “inner controls” – meaning an individual’s moral restraints – that the prospect of committing various other crimes typically does.  Part of the reason for this is that while in most instances (at least under U.S. law) insider trading involves a breach of fiduciary duty – i.e., improper disclosure of a corporate secret –  often the individual benefitting from that transgression is several steps removed from the original wrongdoing (due to the information being passed along or “tipped”).  Per several behavioral ethics experiments, “distance” between the wrongful act itself and the beneficiary of the transgression increases the likelihood of wrongdoing, and in insider trading that distance can be significant indeed.

A related problem is that the specific victims of insider trading – typically anonymous market participants – are not evident to would-be violators. Per  other behavioral research, this second type of distance also tends to diminish internal moral restraints.  Moreover, this sense that insider trading is harmless is, in my view, exacerbated by the arguments of some commentators that such conduct should actually be lawful, to make markets more efficient.

Can any of this be remedied?  I’ll leave the detection issue to those others, but on the behavioral ethics side I think it is imperative that these two types of distance be addressed by, among other things, imagining what things would be like if insider trading was not in fact a crime. Using this sort of “what if?” approach – as we did earlier with conflicts of interest generally  – one can envision a world in which businesses are reluctant to engage in transactions that require confidentiality to be successful, which would hurt productivity in many ways.  This thought experiment also suggests that individuals and organizations would be reluctant to invest in capital markets that they fear may be rigged by insiders, which, in turn, substantially raises the cost of equity to businesses.

Like “conflict of interest world,” insider trading world “is a place of needlessly diminished lives, resources and opportunities.” In my view, effective deterrence in this area requires greater recognition of these harms so that they can fully inform the operation of our inner controls.

Our conflict of interest with the future

This week the Securities and Exchange Commission brought an enforcement action against the State of Illinois for misleading bond purchasers regarding the desperate condition of the state’s pension funding.  While unquestionably a multi-billion dollar fraud against investors, the greater impact of Illinois’ shortfall will, I imagine, be felt by residents of the state, who will have to forgo necessary governmental services – education, health care and roads – to help make good on the debt (though pensioners themselves will presumably pay part of the price, too).

This is not a problem limited to Illinois. Indeed, in my home state of New Jersey the pension funding shortfall is more than $47 billion.  Moreover,  many cities have similar (and possibly even greater) problems of this sort.

And, the deeper evil at work here – making/failing to make decisions today for which future generations will pay an unfair price – is not unique to the realm of public pensions.  It is manifested as well in the failure to check the growth of our enormous national debt and, more ominously still, in our inaction in the face of climate change and the ruin of the oceans, both of which could make life hellish for millions of individuals in the future.

Why is this happening? This problem comes in part from the all-too-human tendency to over-discount the future and part from our tendency to be less concerned about harms where we can’t identify the precise victim in a given case. (For further reading on both phenomena see Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel’s Blind Spots.) I expect that there are multiple other causes as well.

But whatever the causes, we need a dramatic normative shift that will put interests of future generations first and foremost in our thoughts – a change that can be brought about only through a wide range of education, monitoring and related efforts to promote such thinking in a truly effective manner. In short, we need a conflicts of interest compliance and ethics program for society as a whole.

Values, culture and effective compliance communications – the role of behavioral ethics

Compliance-related communications constitute a large part of the day-to-day work of many compliance-and-ethics departments.  But is this work being done in the most effective manner reasonably possible?

“Modeling the Message: Communicating Compliance through Organizational Values and Culture,” – published last fall by attorney  Scott Killingsworth in The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics  - provides a thoughtful examination of what we can learn about compliance  communications from various findings of behavioral science.  The article critiques the traditional approach to compliance communications – which focuses on avoidance of personal risks  – as being premised on a  “rational actor” theory that in recent years has been seriously undermined by the results of behavioral economics/ethics research. In this regard, Killingsworth argues: “Instead of conveying the message that compliance is non-negotiable, [the personal risk versus reward approach] implies that it may be negotiable if the price is right.”  An additional source of concern is that this way of communicating may send the implicit message “that management does not trust employees. Potential side effects of this message range from resentment, to an ‘us-versus-them’ attitude towards management, to a reverse-Pygmalion effect in which employees may tend to ‘live down’ to the low expectations that are projected upon them.”

As an alternative, Killingsworth draws upon the behaviorist concept of “framing” to suggest that communications framed in terms of values and ethics are more likely to be effective in reducing wrongdoing than are traditional compliance communications. In that connection, he describes a study showing “that over eighty percent of compliance choices [in the workplace] were motivated by internal perceptions of the legitimacy of the employer’s authority and by a sense of right and wrong, while less than twenty percent were driven by fear of punishment or expectation of reward.” A second benefit to the values-based approach is that it can better serve as “a source of internal guidance in novel situations” than does the traditional alternative.   Third, communications framed from the former perspective may enhance companies’ efforts to promote internal reporting of violations (obviously an important consideration in the Dodd-Frank era),  a contention that he bases on a study which showed that “the reporting of compliance violations encountered dramatically different effects depending on whether the subjects considered a particular infraction morally repugnant or not.”

As well as discussing communications per se, Killingsworth’s piece examines “the messages implicit in key company behaviors, which can either reinforce, undermine, or obliterate explicit compliance messages.”   So, while explicit communications are important, C&E officers must also “reach across functional boundaries to executive management and the human resources group and, if necessary, educate them about the principles of employee engagement and the value of consistent explicit and behavioral messaging that activates the employees’ values and brings out their [employees'] better natures.” The piece concludes with a list of other practical recommendations – concerning, among other things, culture assessments and communications strategies – for making all these good things happen.

Finally, I should emphasize that this posting only scratches the surface of what is in ”Modeling the Message: Communicating Compliance through Organizational Values and Culture,” and I strongly encourage both C&E professionals seeking to up their respective companies’ communications efforts and behavioral scientists seeking to learn more about how their work can be put to practical use in compliance programs to read the piece in full.