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Guest columnist Ward Graffam was the founding chairman of the Maine International Trade Center and is former chairman and CEO of Unum UK.
Updated: November 11, 2019
How to be a conscientious board member
By Ward Graffam
As a board member, are you listening? It’s a simple question with a potentially complicated answer. In the #metoo era it’s hard to really know what is happening with employee attitudes and behavior in your organization.
Does your organization have a professionally designed yearly cultural survey with carefully selected feed-back mechanisms and a follow-up process?
Does your organization review the yearly changes in that survey to identify improvements and critical problem areas and report those action steps to the organization?
Are there any other avenues for employees to confidentially communicate with upper management without fear of reprisal?
Properly designed surveys provide invaluable feedback and monitoring systems for management and the board.
A common request in today’s world is to speak up if you see something that doesn’t appear to be right. But many employees are fearful of speaking up about workplace conditions and situations involving their boss or other co-workers — understandably. Whether you’re at a publicly traded company, a privately held firm or a nonprofit, your company should have a code of business conduct and ethics that includes communication channels for reporting suspected violations of that code.
Regardless of the size of the organization, a code of conduct is an important document that will provide behavioral boundaries and should provide channels for communication to the top of the organization. If the organization has a business ethics officer or a chairman of the audit committee then that code should require employees to seek guidance and report violations of the code, applicable law or regulations arising in the conduct of the company’s business or occurring on the company’s property.
Ideally, any violations should be reported to an employee’s supervisor. If violations involve that employee’s supervisor, then the organization should provide a separate avenue for such reporting. If the organization has a business ethics officer, then that person provides an ideal alternative communication channel. If the organization doesn’t have an ethics officer, then another good alternative is to report the problem to the chairman of the audit committee. Easy to say, but what if an employee is concerned about confidentiality?
To protect the employee’s feedback and provide confidentiality there should also be statements in the code of conduct allowing anonymous feedback and language prohibiting retaliation against any reporting employee. How can you help ensure that the mechanisms mentioned above have a fair chance of succeeding before they are implemented? Just ask a selected group of employees through some informal “listening sessions” to give you feedback on the proposed tools you intend to use for listening before they are implemented.
One way to check on the validity of your design process is to simply ask a diagonal slice of the employee population, say four to six employees, for a lunch or some other event that would fit the company’s culture. The only rules for such a session are, one, that each employee agrees that the sessions are totally confidential to any persons outside that lunch group and, two, that they will not experience any retaliation for any information provided at the session. If the employees agree with those rules, the likelihood of the management person learning very valuable information about employees’ attitudes, desires and concerns is extremely high.
A commonly heard concern from employees is that they “never hear any results from the feedback we give on surveys intended for management.” An easy way to deal with that concern is to simply tell employees that employee feedback results will be communicated to them on or before “X” date — AND simply deliver on that promise.
Ward Graffam was the founding chairman of the Maine International Trade Center and was chairman and CEO of Unum UK. He has served on numerous boards. He can be reached at wgraffam@aol.com.
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