In Regulated Industries, Ethics is Much More Than a Buzzword
April 04, 2016
By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor
How do you ensure ethics within your organization? There is often a sense that individuals come with a certain code of ethics: they’ll work hard, they won’t steal from the company and they will follow the processes that you have in place. Yet history tells us that people don’t always turn out to be the ethical individuals they propose to be during the interview process. Without checks and balances in place, such as call accounting or audit processes, bad behaviors go unchecked.
Still, monitoring and tracking activities and behaviors to ensure compliance with policies and industry regulations is a full-time job. For those organizations that find it difficult to monitor employees through manual processes or even random checks throughout the year, it helps to have a few tools in place. For call accounting solution provider, ISI Telemanagement Solutions (News - Alert) (ISI), that means offering protective features.
The latest protective feature to enhance calling capabilities comes in the form of the Ethical Wall. This solution is designed to help companies enforce compliance policies while also adhering to specific industry communications regulations. Housed within the Collaborative Recording application from Verba Technologies, an ISI partner, the Ethical Wall keeps certain parties from interacting with other parties in an effort to maintain specific compliance policies or industry regulations.
With the Ethical Wall enabled, companies have the capacity to create a legal compliance solution that works in conjunction with the application. The solution then applies to all Unified Communications (News - Alert), including video, voice, presence, IM, screen sharing or file transfers. The Ethical Wall is then used in conjunction with communication policies to enforce legal compliance, prevent data leakage, avoid conflicts of interest and support workplace procedures.
For companies within industries such as investment banking, law, finance, healthcare, IT/security, journalism and more that are highly regulated, this solution helps to ensure policies are followed so as not to put a company in jeopardy simply because an individual employee wants to operate outside of the typical ethical standards. The Ethical Wall helps to support collaboration rules and regulations for compliance, especially when individuals within these industries connect with others in similarly regulated industries.
Ethical Wall not only offers opportunities for companies to ensure their employees are operating within the policies of the organization and compliance guidelines of the industry, it also streamlines the process so as to eliminate manual bottlenecks and errors. In doing so, companies are in a much better position to ensure their compliance and enforce the ethical promises employees make when they start the job.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi