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. The information that surveys provide is vital; however, meaningful surveys must dig deep, move beyond negative feels and turn information into action.

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Surveys Can Do More Than Check a Box

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In dysfunctional compliance systems, survey results are used to meet regulatory requirements, filed and forgotten. Even worse, they are used to justify the status quo without critical analysis. Carefully examining survey results can allow compliance teams to find areas of breakdown.

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• Use Focus Groups: Conduct focus groups to ensure you have context for survey results.
• Dig Into Gaps: Look for gaps between management perceptions and team ratings to identify areas of breakdown.
• Engage in Cross-Functional Collaboration: collaborate with HR and legal teams to pinpoint root causes, develop solutions, and communicate changes.

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Fully Engage with Negative Feedback

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Engaging with all types of feedback is vital for building an effective, successful compliance system. Positive feedback should be shared and highlighted to ensure everyone knows what is working well. Negative feedback can be more challenging for everyone; it can trigger defensiveness. Ensuring that management teams respond well to negative feedback requires tamping down defensiveness and embracing transparency. Management teams may find this difficult at first, but there are steps you can take to empower managers to help give survey results meaning:

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• Filter Out Noise: Negative feedback provides context for managers; by filtering out the noise, managers can understand compliance challenges and help develop innovative responses.
• Build Trust: Use negative feedback to create new solutions that create transparency and build trus
• Empower Managers: provide support through compliance, legal, and HR teams to navigate negative feedback related to compliance.

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Shift to Action

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Once you have conducted a deep dive into survey results and empowered management teams to address negative feedback, it is time to act. Enhance survey results with meaningful change and action. Change and action build trust in compliance systems and demonstrate to an organization that integrity is valued. Action includes communicating results, updating policies and procedures, researching emerging risks, and ensuring clear communication from leadership.

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By providing a basis for action, surveys become more than a way to check a box. They provide leadership and compliance teams with information that can build trust and strengthen compliance programs.