Here's a relevant portion of the transcript:
Nitish Upadhyaya [Ropes & Gray's Insights Lab]: I think just diving into that a little bit deeper, the ability to interrogate the data and understand those triggers and match them up with things that are happening—with Christmas fast approaching, there are things that you want to be thinking about, or gifts and entertainment, and catching people in that and understanding those trends. Then, you have the feedback loops and actually understanding what your people are feeling, how they’re interacting—you talked about engagement surveys. Talk a little bit about the internal ombuds office because that isn’t something we see very often in organizations, and how does that contribute to justice, fairness, and employees having a voice?
Mayhew: This was added to the agenda that I had when I joined—it came up in a meeting with a business unit leadership team. Someone had been in a previous organization—they had a form of an internal ombuds office. I, in my previous company, was aware of ombuds offices, but it was an external body that you would refer, and employees could go to if they chose to. We became aware through the help line reports—some of which didn’t need to be investigated but to be managed better at a local level with a level of independence, with a level of neutrality that would’ve helped resolve that issue, and that wasn’t happening, sometimes down to the experience of the managers involved or the teams leading certain people—and things were allowed to drift and fester, and then it became more of a problem, and then it ended up in an investigation. We looked at it and said, “If this was managed earlier, this could’ve been prevented. How do you do that?”
We looked at several other companies that had forms of internal ombuds offices, so we took that, looked at the International Ombuds Association—what they did, how they structured, and what their process was—and built, with a remediation services vendor, a program, literally from the ground up. We want this as the internal program. We’re looking to train 20 people in the company from across different business units, not just some ethics and business integrity, HR, or people in culture, but from across the business because you get that depth of experience, diversity, and insights that would be great to share. And then, people can relate more to maybe going to someone who’s more of a colleague than someone who’s just in compliance. So, the goal was to set it up. We did it. It took about eight months to do it. The aim was to have it as an impartial, informal, confidential, and independent service that employees could go to with any kind of problem they might have.
Now, the ombuds team that we ultimately selected, were trained if someone was coming and saying, “There’s a high-risk issue here,” whether it’s a corruption issue or a personal safety issue, that they would escalate that internally and explain the need for us to deal with that as a company. But the charter they have and the governance model they have allows them to manage internal disputes—conflicts that might be arising in the workplace—across the company. And they’re empowered to have a set of options on a menu that they can empower the employee to ultimately help the employee resolve it themselves. They can’t fix everything, but they’re there to advise, guide, and if need be, help resolve things to a successful conclusion.
Related posts: Sanofi Creates Global Ombuds Program; Podcast: CEDR Hosts Four Ombuds
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