Jason B. Meyer, Chair of the Ethics, Compliance, and Corporate Governance Committee of the New Jersey Chapter of ACC and author of the blog LeadGood.org.

Times are tight, to say the obvious least. Maybe it’s not the best time to go asking for a little more than originally budgeted so you can spruce up your company’s ethics and compliance program. But you can still show your powers of alchemy, and make some gold from the stale twigs of hay you have left in the departmental coffers. And here are ten ways to do it, each one of them “practical.” By “practical,” I mean these tactics are doable and should fit within current budgets, which is to say, they’re cheap. Like buying a new tie to brighten an old suit. Best of all, some of these tactics may cost essentially nothing extra in budgetary terms.

1. Refresh Your Code of Conduct. 

I’m not talking about the equivalent of a full kitchen remodeling with granite counters and new appliances. Think instead about the analogy of repainting kitchen cabinet doors yourself. Start by getting a cup of coffee, closing the door, and making a clean read-through of the whole document. (Or have the best writer in the department do it.) Be an editor, and make those changes you know you have been wanting to make for awhile. Purge the remaining legalese. Get rid of all the examples of passive voice, and turn them into active statements of who should do what, with what. That’s not just better English; when you are concerned with compliance, phrases in passive voice can be dangerously ambiguous about who bears the responsibility. Purge the time-sensitive and out-dated references. Does the Code list an old HR contact, or worse, is it signed by a CEO who left last year? Does it refer to people or events that are no longer in the common memory? Does it presume an old org chart? All those things leave an impression that the company is just not that into compliance.

Reduce the sound of the czar, and increase the sound of a teammate. These days, there are economic pressures on folks to cut corners; there are “Millennials” in your workforce who want to feel empowered; and every week there is a new government requirement for self-disclosure, each of which makes your company even more dependent on the willingness of workers to use the Hotline when necessary. In short, these days, you need buy-in. Express that in your Code. Go through the Code and change references from “the Company” to “we.” Use language that has a more inclusive feel, to build a team around ethics and compliance. At least, make the thing readable. Do all that, and then you have an excuse to redistribute or re-launch the Code, and deliver a positive message from Compliance.

Budget alert: Okay, reprinting the Code may cost some money. But you can keep that in check: if necessary, change the text, but not the graphics or layout. Or wait and time your re-release for when you are going to run out of stock on printed Codes anyway. Or be a little more ambitious, and put your Code online. Certainly there is an elegant and tricked-out way to do this, and it looks awesome, but putting the Code online doesn’t necessarily need to be a two-year project for IT and Marketing. Find your allotted corner of the company Intranet, dump the text of the Code onto a few pages and imbed some cross-references. If you really want to make the Code useful, try also imbedding some hyperlinks to the text of relevant and related policies. And if you have training that’s online or in a computerized format (like a PowerPoint), you could link to that, too. If you can’t do it, ask someone handy in Marketing or IT to help -- it won’t take long if you have taken the time to map out what you want. And you can always add more hyperlinks as time goes by. (Okay, Alert over – because most of the rest of this Top Ten will cost you pretty much nothing, budget-wise.)

2. Blog Internally.

As long as you’re using the Intranet, get a conversation going. Let ‘em know that you think compliance should be in the picture all the time, by sharing all the times you think of how something in the Code or in a training course applies to something going on in the business or in the news. Tell stories. Share events. Draw in readers by making your blog the headquarters for your contests (see below). Put a human face on “Compliance,” and people will be more likely to call you when they need to. If you haven’t blogged before, come on in, the water’s fine. There are all kinds of free and intuitive on-line tools to help. And yes, you can easily (and you should) set it up so that no one else’s comments will appear on the Blog until you (or your blogger) have reviewed and approved them. (The main cost here is just your time.)

3. Make Your Internal Communications Program Actually “Ongoing.”

It’s there in law and regulation and guidance and guidelines: one set of courses does not a compliance program make. The communication of your compliance message is supposed to be internal and “ongoing.” But that’s not merely a compliant practice, it’s a best practice. Because selling the compliance message is just like selling most anything else: the message is more effective the more often you repeat it. (I can establish that fact with one sentence of cross-examination: What’s “so easy a caveman could do it”? I rest my case.)

So start taking advantage of all the cheap and easy ways you can think of to spread the word about your program, and to remind your teams about key ethics and compliance messages. And then, mix it up. Send a short email about gifting. Put an article in the newsletter about conflicts. Put signs in the cafeteria about the Hotline. Yeah, I know, you do that already. But this is a time for belt-tightening and for reality-checking. You’re not marketing compliance as much as you could, are you? You’re not being as creative as you know how, are you? To push my comparison, does your internal communications program have a caveman and a gecko?

Kick it up a notch. Make a list of all the internal communications channels you can use, and then make a list of how you will use each one of them, every month or two, to “market” compliance. There are vendors who will sell you some dandy tools and libraries to make all this as easy as cutting-and-pasting. But if you really have to watch the pennies, face it, this stuff is just not that hard to do yourself, or to do with internal resources. You could always spread the wealth, and assign one short newsletter article or e-mail message to each lawyer in the company. That will give you a mini-library of your own. Just remember to run it all by a good editor!

4. Practice “Choice Architecture.”

This buzz-phrase comes from the popular book, “Nudge,” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and it has caught on. Here’s what choice architecture means to you, in its briefest form: Remember that the way you build and deploy your compliance program sets up myriad choices for your teams. The order in which they take courses. How quickly they complete tasks. Whether they should add a comment to a certification form. Whether to report suspected wrongdoing. So, Thaler and Sunstein teach us, be a proactive “choice architect.” Make sure the right choice, or the most effective choice, is, for your audience, the easiest choice. Because most folks will let inertia push them toward accepting the default, make sure you like the default. For example, instead of just telling everyone they need to attend one of the upcoming live training sessions, assign them to one of the sessions and give them the ability to reschedule to another session. Then the default is that they go to a session, instead of the default being that they don’t go at all. (But be careful not to take this too far -- i.e., don’t pre-select “no conflicts” for them on a disclosure form!)

All this is akin to another catchphrase of 2009: “behavioral economics.” Whatever you call it, the bottom line is to be innovative about putting in place procedures and processes that encourage compliant behavior. Keep thinking of ways to make it in peoples’ economic interests to behave in a compliant manner. Want another example....

5. Try a Little Positive Reinforcement.

Let’s face it, our messages can be a real drag. Lawyers are very good at saying, “Don’t do this, or else…”. So try looking for ways to reward ethical and compliant actions, rather than just punishing the wrong-doers. Create contests for people who complete their training on time. Establish annual awards for your “Ethics Heroes,” the same way your company probably does for the lead salesperson or the best R&D leader. Then, find a way for employees to report when they catch people in the act of doing the right thing – perhaps through questions in your annual survey, or even through calls to your Hotline. And then draw another prize winner from among the people who report good news about their friends. And suddenly, you have given positive reinforcement for ethical actions… and positive reinforcement for reporting. The old song says, to make up for that same-old shabby dress, try a little tenderness. It can work for the same-old compliance program, too.

6. Engage Your CEO – and Make it Easy for Your CEO to Be Engaged.

Certainly you know by now about “tone at the top,” and about how everything from the Federal Sentencing Guidelines to state anti-harassment laws will judge your compliance program based on whether the top executives are genuinely a part of it. But remember that Enron had a Code of Conduct, too, and it started with a letter from the CEO… probably just like yours. So don’t wait around for your CEO to decide to put in the time to give more than lip service to your compliance program. She’s busy, and she’s worried about the profits, so cut her some slack -- about some things. Be her ghostwriter: write a blurb in her name for the company newsletter, encouraging folks to use the Hotline, and get her to take just five minutes to review and edit it. While you’re there, take a picture of her at her computer with one of the training courses open on the screen: you can use that picture in your internal marketing. And, you can take the opportunity to show her how to open and complete the course. (From that requirement, she gets no slack.) Cost? Nada.

7. Tone in the Middle.

While you’re at it, it may be even more effective to get middle managers and supervisors involved in delivering your messages. First, if an employee sees that his immediate supervisor actually values ethics and the compliance program, that sends a strong and immediate message that the program is for real -- and that ethics really might matter at evaluation time. That line supervisor also then becomes your ally, by being a new, and for employees, easy, avenue for reporting and inquiry. To get middle managers involved, make life easy for them. Use “train-the-trainer” techniques to make them part of your ongoing communications effort: send them a short PowerPoint on a relevant topic, with a script in the Notes field, that they can present at a staff meeting. Or let the middle managers be the ones to announce your contest for the best Good News about ethics. 

8. Talk about Your Policies.

Once, a compliance officer explained to me why his company’s training courses always centered on the company’s policy, and hardly mentioned the law. His concern was that if he talked about the chapter and verse of the law, some of his employees would play amateur lawyer, and try to interpret the statutes in order to find ways to skirt around them. (Not sure what I mean? Then casually tell a sample of international salespeople about “facilitating payments” and watch closely as some of them try to do an end-run around the FCPA!) Instead, his strategy was to train his teams on the company policy, and to explicitly eschew interpretation. His message, essentially, was this: “Compliance and Legal have worked with the business leaders to find the right balance between minimizing risks and maximizing sales, and that balance is reflected in our company policies. Now, don’t bother reconsidering that balance; just follow the policy.”

But setting and promoting company policies in key compliance areas can have an additional value: it establishes ethical norms for your community. That was one of the lessons learned from a study published in May in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The study gave med students, in the course of an exercise, little trinkets that promoted the anti-cholesterol drug Lipitor. At one school, where drug companies were allowed to hand out such promo items, the students came to view Lipitor more favorably. But at another med school, which generally banned promotional items, students wound up thinking less of the drug after they got the items. (For more on this study, see my contemporaneous blog posting.) Your policies do help people decide (consciously or subconsciously) what is right and what is wrong.

And from a cost point of view, you already have your policies. Just remember to keep them both up-to-date and front-and-center.

9. Get Focused and Short-Term Help.

A lot of compliance tasks are intense for a brief period, and then require less effort on an ongoing basis. Examples include: implementing new curriculum and training plans, refreshing and redeploying policies, establishing a plan for internal communications, or conducting a program assessment. After an intense period, all that remains to do is implement and watch the metrics.

A happy side of this economy, for you, is that there are lots of lawyers and compliance pros out there, looking for part-time or temporary contract work. So use them! Get the extra help you need to explore new options, start the implementation, and get your regular staff resources up to speed – and once you’re cruising, say thanks and take it solo from there. There’s a cost, but it’s not in permanent headcount.

10. Don’t Be a Stranger.

Compliance is not a lonely profession anymore. There are lots of our peers out there, people to talk to, and conversations to listen to. ACC is one place to do it; so are a number of boards, blogs and threaded chats spread across the virtual social network. They are sharing best practices like crazy. And they are pretty much free. The stimulation of some expert discussion just might perk you up -- and that may be the best way to perk up your compliance program.