With the current geopolitical climate, developing a compliance training program is difficult, as compliance topics at the forefront continue to shift and evolve. How do I prepare for the coming year?

A CEO’s words on ethics and integrity matter. The CEO sets the tone, signals the company’s integrity priorities, and determines how employees understand the company’s culture. A CEO’s public speeches, online statements, and inspiring declarations signal leadership’s commitment to integrity. While CEOs are essential, they do not exist in a vacuum, they are one part of an integrity system.

In the Vulnerability to Resilience series, we have explored how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) use their vulnerabilities to create. SMEs possess the agility that enables them to identify risks early and maintain community and business relationships, which SMES can leverage to prioritize integrity and open new markets. Cooperation allows SMEs to raise their ethical standards in the market. In this next segment, we examine another SME advantage: the power to innovate.

For small and medium enterprises (SMEs), compliance feels like a lonely climb up a steep mountain. Costs are high, rules are constantly evolving, and there is pressure to cut corners to keep pace. Standing alone, an ethical SME can lose when competing with actors who ignore the rules.

Surveys are a tool that allows compliance and ethics professionals to understand the effectiveness of an integrity program. They provide insights on how comfortable employees feel speaking up, how they view integrity successes, and identify emerging challenges. They are a way to signal that your company operates with integrity and is less of a risk for potential partners and collaborators. Paired with other monitoring tools, their insights are both powerful and essential...

Leveraging SMES compliance and integrity advantages is both strategic and necessary for MNCs. MNCs have large and uniform integrity programs that drive compliance. However, Home Office compliance teams may be slower to respond to emerging risks. SMEs can help MNCs improve their knowledge and response time to emerging risks as they have agility, a local perspective, and can serve as an early warning system for MNC integrity systems...