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Easing Compliancy Challenges with BlackBerry® Pushcasts

Today’s corporations realize that how they do business is a vital reflection of their company to investors, clients, and employees. Reputation is a critical element of a company’s brand, and damage to that reputation has high market share and financial repercussions. As successful business leaders understand, a compliant and ethical culture can yield strong business benefits, and well-managed compliance programs greatly reduce the risk of corporate misconduct.

A Compelling Case for Compliance

The compliancy stakes have gone up, and the need for tracked, secure, and up-to-date compliance is more pressing than ever. Recent Federal Sentencing Guidelines stipulate more severe penalties for companies who have not taken clear, measurable steps to prevent misconduct. As a result, companies recognize the importance of having effective and measurable programs in place to:

• Engage leadership and ensure they are informed and accountable.

• Ensure employees are educated, and responsible, and able to report issues.

• Manage compliance processes (plan and implement programs, detect, respond to, or address issues, and track and measure results).

Compliancy Challenges

It is obvious that with strong compliance programs, a company can reduce risks of loss and liability and foster a winning, successful culture. To be effective, these programs must extend to all employees, but often the demands of time and travel make it hard for executives, managers, and field-based employees to plug in and dedicate time to ethics and compliance programs. Compliance gaps arise when these employees fail to complete assignments and sign off on company policy.

An essential aspect of compliance is tracking. Compliance managers must keep an accurate record of all materials and requests sent to each employee and the resulting employee completion and agreement. Frequently companies need to deliver external reports of this information and manage internal audits to demonstrate compliance. In the worst cases, companies may require records to comply with investigations or legal proceedings. With a large scale work force constantly on the move, corporations are challenged to track each and every compliance agreement for each and every employee.

Another continual challenge for compliance programs is to drive ongoing engagement. Organizations with mature compliance programs worry about losing employee attention while maintaining consistent enterprise-wide delivery and messaging. They must determine how to keep employees interested in ongoing refreshers and updates. For example, many companies deliver a monthly vignette or video scenario involving ethical decision-making. The intention is to keep ethics and compliance top-of-mind for employees, but such refreshers prove difficult for busy, remote employees to access, and such materials may not be taken seriously. Again, reliable tracking, dependable message delivery, and variable content are paramount to a healthy compliance program.

How Mobile chalkboard™ Can Help

In today’s increasingly mobile workforce, the ability to deliver compliance programs using mobile tools, like BlackBerry® smartphones, is ideal. Executives and field-based/traveling employees can complete compliance programs and get up to speed on the latest company policies directly from their handheld, instead of waiting until they return to their desk. This greater flexibility also increases productivity, as employees can use downtime to attend to compliance. In addition, getting compliance assignments done while employees are on the road is much more time and cost effective than traditional methods of bringing people into corporate offices or shipping packages to and from head office.

A mobile compliance application enables head office to close the gap. Engaging, interactive, and trackable compliancy content can be delivered as a BlackBerry ‘pushcast’ and readily available for employees to complete - anytime, anywhere.

Mobile chalkboard™ has multiple compliance-centric applications:

1. Policies & Terms of Use
Distribute key policies like codes-of-conduct, travel and gifts, computer and data security, etc. to ensure they are always available. This eliminates any excuse for “not knowing the policy”.

2. Policy/Regulation Updates
Notify employees of changes to important policies or regulations that affect employee activities and responsibilities (around ethical, compliance, or regulatory issues) - and track that employees have received, read, and understood the update.

3. Tone-from-the-Top Message
Most ethics/compliance programs contain an executive or CEO message about the importance of ethical behavior and compliance. Capture this message in video format and send out via BlackBerry pushcast – directly to the hands of your employees.

4. Attestations and Acknowledgements
Many companies survey or send a questionnaire to capture acknowledgement and agreement to key policies, so they have it documented. Using Mobile chalkboard, you can send these out wirelessly, and have employees (via their BlackBerry) agree to a code-of-conduct, report potential conflicts of interest, confirm receipt of company property such as a computer or phone, and/or agree to use company property per corporate policy.

5. Refreshers
Many compliance program managers worry about training fatigue and losing the moral aspect of an ethics message when assignments are mandated. To keep employees engaged and important compliance do’s/don’ts top of mind, incorporate engaging mobile video updates and interactive “refresher” messages into your compliance program.

6. Ethics and Compliance Training
Deliver training in the form of mobile courses to employees’ Blackberry smartphones – not only for immediate completion, but also to store for future reference. Content could include codes-of-conduct, conflict of interest, harassment prevention, etc.

Mobile chalkboard™
Features that Support Compliance

The following Mobile chalkboard ™ features align directly with the needs of compliancy programs.

• Recordkeeping and electronic paper trails to support audits and investigations.

• Tracked receipt of compliancy agreements to make sure all employees deliberately
  acknowledge and agree to requirements or standards – including:

a) Proper and secure use of company property and confidentiality of information – especially with IT equipment and data security.

b) Potential conflicts of interest (can be an annual survey to ensure reporting).

c Policies around insider trading, gifts, entertainment, etc.

• Media-rich, diverse content that keeps employees focused and engaged.

• A secure channel, separate from email for employees to receive potentially confidential or sensitive information.

• Offline access that allows content to be cached and accessed ubiquitously, even when connectivity isn’t available.

• Flexible content creation and publishing, which can be done by anyone with basic desktop skills.

For more information on easing compliance challenges with BlackBerry Pushcasts, please contact us at bvanhatten@chalk.com.