How to stimulate the drive to enhance corporate culture
FIFA, Volkswagen, Petrobras, BP and others can be added
to the long list of governance failures past the credit and financial crisis
that more or less wiped out the accumulated equity of the western financial
institutions. The companies and oversight authorities have all undertaken
to clean up their governance act to show meaningful results and the willingness
to be able to implement and monitor the corporate culture of dishonesty.
The new look on organisational perspectives
and insights in stimulating Corporate Culture, we take a hard Look at
the softer issues in the organisation that consistently and continuous
monitoring cannot discover. How to improve and support corporate culture
and that management can uncover the soft, unwritten and customary ways
of taking the decisions to bypass the cumbersome bureaucratic processes.
Employee behaviour influences decisions
The key to effective monitoring of the organisational culture needs an
insightful and massive understanding of the real values and management
and employee behaviour and how the combination influences decisions, priorities
about good governance, risk management, compliance and internal controls.
There are just far too many high-profile compliance failures in recent
years that are interwoven to corporate business cultures that in fact
encouraged, allowed, or looked past forbidden performance.
Check-the-box for adequate procedures
Therefore, Copenagen Compliance® has created a series of ethics and
integrity workshops with the primary focus on sustainable business growth.
Together we find solutions on how the growth ensures compliance in all
corners of the organisation by monitoring the uncharted area of corporate
culture. The other option is to solely rely on results from employee surveys
or exit interviews, train the staff on concrete subjects required to ensure
check-the-box for adequate procedures.
Governance failures can inspire best practice
There are several GRC aspects of corporate failure and the primary issue,
in general, is the lack of corporate governance or, in particular, one
or more of the governance components of unstructured enterprise risk management,
board and management practices, remuneration system, accountability transparency
and or the quality and norms of disclosure.
Therefore, in 2016, we suggest that global corporations focus on accountability,
transparency and oversight aspects to draw significant lessons in deficient
areas that define the GRC culture.
The GRC culture influences the management and employees decisions at unconscious
levels, and the results affect stakeholders´ interests. The tone at the
top must be to understand the boundaries where controls can be operated
and that the GRC policies and rules apply to everyone in the organisation
as they pursue their business goals.
Besides the three step implementation explained elsewhere in the newsletter
there are three aspects of implementing a GRC culture to create the necessary
depth in the processes and the organisation.
Governance Culture: Ensure focus on governance and list all governance
components that will the corporate desire to build on all stakeholders
with quality, focus and dedication. Sophisticated information architecture
is the key to ensure that structured big data can interpret the managements
dealing with ambiguities in the decision making process to address the
real issues of good and structured processes to enrich the ethics and
integrity issues of corporate governance.
Risk Culture: are defined by the structure of values and behaviours
in governance culture that affect the risk decisions. All stakeholders
must understand the company risk exposure, in fact that should be the
first figure that turns up on the screen when management or senior employees
log on to the computer. Besides risk policies, statements and procedures,
the risk culture are created by GRC training, enterprise risk assessment
and guidance on using the data for prudent decision-making.
Compliance Culture: Depending on the overall compliance environment
in the organisation the degree of real, effective and value creating compliance
in most organisation is rather limited. Most global organisations are
not even in sync with the definition of compliance within the various
jurisdictions, which affects how compliance issues are handed. The lack
of a common meaning is detrimental to how effective a company is in meeting
compliance regulations. Creating a strong compliance culture is to follow
the right processes and perform the right controls and deterring and detecting
compliance problems without oversight.
During such GRC workshops we cover how to be proactive in using GRC to
comply with compliance issues, interpreting the intention and make use
of the GRC funds to create value.
