Klaus Moosmayer on the Novartis Employee Survey [Podcast]

Compliance Perspectives

By Adam Turteltaub A good employee survey on compliance and ethics can yield a wealth of data on how your program is and isn’t working, where the risks are, and how to move forward. The challenge is getting the survey right and getting employees to respond. Klaus Moosmayer, Member of the Executive Committee and Chief Ethics, Risk and Compliance Officer at Novartis, shares in this podcast that the compliance team has just completed the second round of their survey. The goal was to get first-hand data from as many employees globally as they could about any unethical behavior they perceive around them and how it is acted on. The survey was developed with substantial help from behavioral scientists, who created a questionnaire that captured where the company is now but also enabled them to dig deeper into key issues. For example, in the first round of the survey the Novartis team discovered that approximately 80% of employees go first to their leaders and managers when seeing unethical behavior. In the second survey they focused on what the leaders are doing with those reports. To encourage responses from employees, they invested the time in preparing the workforce and setting the context that the survey is a part of a broader effort to strengthen company culture. The messaging behind the survey was both local and global, with company presidents underscoring the importance of the study. After the first survey was completed, they made the effort to showcase how the data was used and what would be changing at Novartis as a result. That helped earn higher participation rates for the second survey. How does the data get used? The aggregated data helps inform leadership and enabled conversations as high as the board level. The data is also incorporated into the company’s integrated digital ethics, risk and compliance platform. Country managers are shown their data and told how it compared to other regions, which, of course, indicates how well they are or aren’t doing versus their peers. Local leaders are then encouraged to use the data to have roundtables, town halls and other meetings to understand why their scores are what they are. Listen in to learn what made the Novartis survey so successful and how to improve your own.