2020 Year of Compliance: March

Challenge: Ensuring Remote Staff Are Able to Raise Concerns Confidentially

Ensuring employees feel safe and secure is one of the top priorities for Soneva, a luxury resort group with properties in the Maldives and Thailand. The company prides itself on open lines of communication between hosts – Soneva’s term for resort employees – and management.

Joanne Bowen, Chief Host Engagement Officer, travels frequently to the resorts to meet and speak with the teams and during one of these visits she learned that there were instances when female hosts were sometimes hesitant to use those direct lines of communication to report sensitive issues or to discuss concerns. Joanne wanted to make certain that hosts would always feel comfortable to approach the company to discuss any issue, so decided to look for a way to enhance the existing lines of communication by providing a safe way for hosts to make a report directly to her and the senior leadership (Core) team.

Solution: EthicsPoint® Opens Up a New Line of Communication

Acting on a recommendation from a colleague, Joanne turned to NAVEX Global’s incident management solution, EthicsPoint, to help her provide a safe, anonymous reporting solution, that was not only available to all hosts to report any incidents that they witnessed that went against Soneva’s Core Values, but also opened an additional line of communication for Soneva’s female hosts working at the resorts in the event that they experienced any incidents that made them feel uncomfortable.

“It was a case of, ‘How can we make our hosts feel safer, and have the opportunity to report any incidents confidentially?’” commented Joanne Bowen. “On the ground there, I was made aware of an incident where a host had felt uncomfortable to come forward and report an incident directly, fearing that it might get back to parties involved, or wouldn’t be handled discreetly. We thought that having EthicsPoint as a reporting tool would be an ideal opportunity, if there were any such incidents in the future, to provide our hosts with an alternative method for reporting incidents, if they wished.”

Soneva uses a version of EthicsPoint that provides employees with secure online access to a confidential reporting system. Joanne worked with NAVEX Global customer support to customise the website’s submission page and set up the case management system to provide a secure repository to track and review each report to Soneva’s specific needs. NAVEX Global also worked to translate the online report intake form into Thai.

Joanne made sure that EthicsPoint is highly visible throughout the organization by putting posters in all of Soneva’s offices and host restaurants. Hosts are now fully aware that EthicsPoint is available to them, and the importance of reporting a concern is reiterated at every team meeting. Soneva’s Founder and CEO, Sonu Shivdasani also mentions the availability of EthicsPoint regularly at the Company’s quarterly ‘CEO Connect’ forum.

Results: Building Trust in the Community by Improving Safety

For Soneva, deploying EthicsPoint goes beyond helping make hosts feel safer – the software also contributes to the company’s larger goals. In the Maldives, only 4% of women are in the workforce. Soneva is working to change that at its resorts. Right now, 18% of its workforce are women. Joanne wants to see that number go even higher. Part of pushing that number up is working with local families to help them understand that not only do the resorts give Maldivian women the opportunity to develop rewarding careers, but that they are a safe place for women to work. “We are working with the community to help change a cultural mindset. Historically women have not tended to work in the hospitality industry in the Maldives as it had been seen as a predominantly male domain, yet by targeting the parents and showing them that we as a company are doing all we can to make sure our resorts provide a safe environment for young women to come and work and develop their careers, we are starting to make some great progress, not only at our resorts but within the hospitality industry in the Maldives as a whole,” Joanne explained. Overall, the hosts have been happy to have this new avenue of communication open to them.

About Soneva

Soneva is the sustainable luxury resort group founded by Sonu Shivdasani and his wife, Eva Malmström Shivdasani, in 1995. The success of the Soneva brand also paved the way for Six Senses Resorts and Spas, with award-winning properties in Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Under Eva’s and Sonu’s direction the Six Senses brand gained a global following before being sold in 2012. Today Soneva has many imitators, but no equals. Each Soneva – and a yachting experience, Soneva in Aqua– impresses on a wide range of levels. Breathtaking ‘remote but accessible’ natural locations, effortlessly chic accommodation, incredible food, truly memorable activities, an inspiring ethos of sustainability and service that is uncannily intuitive.

White Paper: Our Approach to Culture Assessments

How to Perform an Effective Culture Assessment

INTRODUCTION

In order for a business conduct and compliance programme to be successful, it must be firmly rooted and supported by company values that are reflected in a strong corporate culture. But even in the best companies, subcultures and employee perceptions can at times be obstacles to the efforts. A culture assessment identifies elements of an organisation’s culture that support good business conduct—and others that do not. It provides recommendations on how to further develop the former and mitigate the latter. It is often an eye opener for leadership and a major catalyst for improving management engagement and support.

A company should consider conducting an ethics culture assessment in order to answer these questions:

Do employees believe that we have a culture of integrity?
What can we do to build trust and credibility with employees so they will raise questions and concerns?
Where are the potential pressure points in the organisation that could cause good people to make a bad decision?
How do we engage our leaders in fulfilling their ethics and compliance responsibilities?
How do employees perceive our business conduct communications? Training? Reporting systems?

Information for culture assessments should be gathered using the following methods: interviews, focus groups and employee surveys. Interviews provide insight on leadership engagement and support. Focus groups provide both quantitative and qualitative information and they allow us to dig deeper into employee opinions and examine location or job-specific issues. Most importantly, focus groups provide opportunities to understand the underlying reasons for employee perceptions.

Download the full white paper here > >

The global communications firm Edelman published their annual Edelman Trust Barometer in January. As usual, the report gave ethics and compliance officers much to consider, not all of it good.

The Edelman report is a survey of people’s trust in various institutions, from government to business to non-governmental organizations. For 2020, it polled more than 34,000 people across 28 countries. The report itself has been published every year since 2000, making this is a deep, telling look at how much trust people place in organizations.

Globally, people are marginally more trusting than not: overall trust in institutions stands at 54, on a scale of 1 to 100. That’s up a measly one point from 2019, and two points from 2017. So we are moving toward greater trust, albeit in the smallest steps possible.

Businesses Are Most Trusted by Their Own Employees

More relevant for ethics and compliance professionals is people’s trust in business.

Globally, trust in business stands at 58%, up 1 point from last year. In the United States, however, trust in business fell by 4 points to 50% – which means business is teetering on the brink of being largely distrusted. In Britain, Japan, Germany, and South Korea, trust in business is already below that 50% threshold.

The one bit of good news is that people’s trust in their own employer is quite high: 76%, up 1 point from last year. That’s nearly 20 points higher than their trust in any other type of organization.

This is an opportunity for ethics and compliance officers. Your employees are deeply suspicious of just about every organization they encounter, but not your specific one. So your goal isn’t necessarily to increase trust with your employees; it’s to keep it.

How, exactly? That brings us to more findings in the Edelman report, which might be less comforting.