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All public companies need an ethics hotline; well run public companies need Listen Up.
Being a good corporate citizen has understandably received special focus of late, but it requires ongoing attention at the well-run public company. Earning and maintaining the trust of your investors, and indeed all stakeholders, is essential to your success.
We hear "corporate governance", "corporate citizenship" and many related phrases bandied about. Despite the cliché or the mushiness of these terms, public companies need to deliver profitable growth and high integrity.
Rigorous and unwavering adherence to the law is not a difficult concept, although executing consistently is harder than it looks. Even companies with the healthiest workplace environments experience fraud and illegal behavior from time to time. When it isn't nipped in the bud, it tends to recur, which is why corporations must have the strongest probability of identifying wrongdoing if it is occurring, and must get early-warning indicators of attitudes and behaviors which are likely to lead down the wrong road. Likewise, they must educate employees about how they must behave.
There are now laws like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and Canadian MI 52-110 requiring public entities to have hotlines and other ethics initiatives. The Federal Sentencing Guidelines make effective compliance and ethics programs vital in legal cases involving employee misconduct. It has become increasingly difficult to mitigate under these guidelines. Ethics initiatives that are not in keeping with the scale and complexity of your organization can be used to prove recklessness or to justify punitive damages.
The public stock exchanges have also issued rules on the subject. The goal is admirable in all of these rules, yet just complying with the law is not enough to earn and maintain the trust of your investors, and will certainly not create the competitive advantage for your company that Syrus Global's solutions afford you.
To be one of the world's most admired companies, several interrelated goals must be simultaneously targeted:
- A healthy corporate culture
- Strong and repeatable financial performance
- Unwavering compliance with legal and accounting rules
A healthy corporate culture requires values-based actions beyond what the law requires. Every day that you lead and enhance the culture of your business, you are adding to your reputation bank. Lapses in judgment or brushing little problems under the rug can deplete the reputation bank in the blink of an eye.
Listen Up's holistic understanding of the public company – from the boardroom to the front line – fashioned the serious approach that we take to providing ethics and compliance services. Take us by the arm, and your reputation will be the better for it.
"Never promise more than you can perform."
Publilius Syrus
100 B.C.
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