measuring tools now. Startups, for their part, can initiate these risk assessments, pinpointing potential compliance tripwires specific to their niche. The Theranos debacle underscores the gravity of due diligence in startups. Elizabeth Holmes’s biotech startup, hailed for its innovative blood-testing technology, crumbled under the weight of unmet promises and misrepresentations; Holmes is now in prison. Boards that benefit from clearer, more timely information also benefit from being able to predict risk. Stakeholders, now more than ever, should exercise meticulous scrutiny, particularly when revolutionary technologies are on the table. And for VCs, the playbook should involve deeper dives into the startups they invest in. Being advocates for strong ethics and compliance programs, better risk mitigation and more stringent third-party due diligence can only help protect reputations and ensure these companies grow into world leaders.
understands the values and ethical behaviors expected of them, while affording the compliance team the ability to audit vendor performance. Smaller, fast-growing companies have the perfect opportunity to embed new technology to allow them to start with the right foot first and grow into these best practices, scaling as they scale. Smaller organizations can benefit by benchmarking how their E&C program compares to best practices across certain dimensions. Those same benchmarking tools can also compare an E&C program to peer companies. All these endeavors can help enable insightful and fact-based decisions to continuously advance a company’s values-based culture. Beyond risk mitigation, it can also serve to communicate with the board more effectively when reporting on performance or requesting more resources. But we need to start implementing these foundational
programs are more than twice as likely to leverage data from a variety of sources to guide E&C program focus and development as part of ongoing evaluation, including risk analysis, misconduct trends and patterns, root cause analysis data, ethical culture surveys, training content retention, benchmarking and much more (on average, 56% compared to 26% of low-performing programs). Begin at the beginning Where do we start? Well, we start by evaluating where we are now. Evaluating the maturity of our programs shouldn’t be a burden. Identifying main risks should be done periodically, but still many companies rely on a snapshot in time and so fail to focus on emerging risks. We always recommend an organization update its current supplier compliance training process into a digital, more scalable solution for training and reporting. Any solution should ensure an organization’s vendor community
By Ty Francis
corporatecomplianceinsights.com | 11
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