The secret to good ethics and compliance communication is to spruce up the delivery and not to be afraid to try new things, said speakers at Compliance Week 2011, which took place this week in Washington.

“I think what's next for me is Tweet Chat— I don't know what it is, but I'll try stuff, babies won't die,” said Kathleen Edmond, chief ethics officer at Best Buy. She had an earlier career as a social worker, where babies' lives were dependent on good work, she explained, and therefore recognizes that the barriers to experimenting in the compliance world shouldn't be prohibitive, even if they seem daunting.

Joel Katz, vice president, associate general counsel, and chief ethics officer at CA Inc., agreed: “Embrace failure. If it doesn't work, then you know, you check it off, and you try something else.” Katz recognized that while this may be a challenge for compliance officers who may be “relatively conservative by nature,” they would be amazed at what they could accomplish if they took a few chances.

Edmond, whose creative channels for delivering ethics messages were a highlight of the “Compliance Communication” session, explained her initial hesitation when asked by her “muses within the organization” to start an ethics blog for Best Buy (www.kathleenedmond.com) in 2008. “I said, ‘I can't do that,' I'm Scandinavian, I'm from the Midwest, I've got boundaries like that--” she said, raising her arms, “I can't go out in public like this.” Finally, she was convinced by her 15 volunteers from across the firm who help her ensure her program “stays edgy,” that the generation she was dealing with “has to know who you are, you have to have a point of view, and they will reach out.” And that's exactly what happened, once she started the blog. First, it became a huge hit—getting 17,000 unique hits a month as of last fall. Now, once a week, she'll get a call from a reader who tells her about a real-life ethics situation. She'll take out the names and any financial information and post it. The blog is also fodder for internal ethics conversations. (Edmond has an HR communications colleague to do the writing, calling her own legalese prose “deadly.”) 

Ethics professionals who are nervous about putting up public blogs and have internal ones instead are just as exposed as she is, as long as they haven't disabled the cut-and-paste function, Edmond said. “This way, I own the message—no one can take a part of it and say, ‘This is what this lady is saying inside.'” She said that she also isn't phased that half of the firm's attorneys walk by her office and say, “You're going to cost me $2 million in discovery.” The other half of Best Buy attorneys loves her program, she said.

Edmond's blog has led to new opportunities, as well. About a month ago, she got a call informing her that her program was “getting killed” on the Geek Forum, an online chat website with a focus on ethics, where there were complaints that when people called her hotline, their issues weren't properly understood. Edmond said that one of her volunteers offered to solve the problem by fielding ethics questions under the persona “Agent of Justice.” Now, he answers 10-12 questions a day. Most of them are not ethics issues, but operating procedure issues.

Of course, Edmond acknowledged that effective communication has to be tailored to the audience and that the average age of employees at Best Buy is low. “What I'm doing wouldn't work at 99 percent of your organizations,” she told the room full of fellow compliance officers. “It's about understanding your employee and understanding what you're trying to accomplish.”

Conferences like Compliance Week 2011 enable representatives from other firms to get ideas for communicating and to adopt them in a way that makes sense for their organizations, concluded Edmond. “It's keeping it fresh; the message doesn't change.”

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