What We Can Learn from Companies That Got Compliance Right During the Pandemic

by Francine Breckenridge, Compliance & Legal Officer, U.S. Money Reserve

The calendar may have flipped to 2021, but the long-term impacts of 2020 are still being felt across businesses all over the country and around the world. Even though 2020 was one of the most challenging years we’ve faced individually, as corporate leaders and as a country, we have had plenty of opportunities to learn and evolve to meet the future. While there have been plenty of spectacular failures on the compliance front, there have been some real successes from which we can learn. Here are three lessons from companies that got compliance right during the pandemic.

Always Put Your Employees’ Safety and Mental Well-Being First

Prior to the pandemic, plenty of “corporate wellness” programs purported to help employees get healthier. Whether they offered a discounted gym membership or yoga during lunch, companies believed that they were doing enough to keep employees happy and healthy.

Then came 2020, which utterly upended these programs and showed just how vulnerable we all are to the virus and the havoc it can wreak on everything from supply chains to personal lives. As I have said before, our companies cannot exist without our employees. COVID-19 shifted the focus of business leaders to ensure that the right precautions are taken to protect employees from getting physically sick, as well as taking care of their mental health.

Kaiser Permanente provides a good example. In May 2020, they launched a partnership with Calm, a meditation app, and made it free to both employees and members. While the launch was previously planned, the timing was serendipitous. The app was available to more than 12 million members. Don Mordecai, M.D., psychiatrist, and national leader for mental health and wellness at Kaiser Permanente, said in the press release, “As we all continue to grapple with the uncertainty, stress, and sometimes fear brought on by COVID-19, it’s essential that we tend to our physical and mental health.”

As another example, take Stop & Shop, a grocery chain in the Northeast. At the start of the pandemic, rather than cutting wages, they gave their workers a 10% raise and two weeks of paid leave to help them deal with the rising demands of work.

Finally, take a look at Target. In April, the company invested more than $300 million to support both customers’ and employees’ safety and health. Associates also got a $2 per hour raise. Additionally, Target offered paid leave for associates whose age and/or health conditions put them at an increased risk of experiencing severe effects of the virus.

One key element that stands out in these three examples is how “unskilled” laborers (retail, restaurant, etc.) became essential, frontline workers within a few short months. There’s a lesson here for both company leaders and businesses: All work should be valued equally.

These three cases show how businesses put employees’ health and well-being first, which in turn helped these companies put their customers front and center and allowed them to meet customer needs when required. Protecting your employees and your workforce with smart compliance can make a world of difference during difficult times.

Shifting Business Lines to Meet Needs

There are hundreds of stories of businesses shifting their business lines to meet the needs of those on the frontlines of the pandemic. Nearly every business from Nike to Gap started making masks for consumers. They also sourced and donated PPE, gowns, and other equipment to frontline hospitals and workers.

Sure, companies have always done charity work, and in recent history, social good has been a quick path to business success. Compliance officers and companies on the whole need to take a good, hard look at how they can help alleviate some of the pressure of a global catastrophe — and take the profit questions out of it. The entire world is facing this crisis, and the only way to survive it both physically and financially is to support one another in the ways we can. If that means shifting some manufacturing lines to fashioning gowns for frontline workers or working across industries to create a better mask, it’s high time that business leaders take steps to make that happen — and not just out of the need to look as if they are doing something socially responsible.

With every business line shift, there are new compliance hurdles to be surmounted. Gap, for example, had never made hospital scrubs or gowns. They reworked their manufacturing lines in order to make that shift and meet hospital requirements for the garments. Doing so involved everyone from the C-suite down to the line worker to make the change happen and ensure that specific standards were met so that the new goods created wouldn’t go to waste because of an error in specifications. While many states in the U.S. are still deep in a tremendous surge of the virus, it remains to be seen what the longer-term impact of these line shifts might be.

Always Be Innovating

When it comes to innovation, most business leaders probably think about the topic in the context of how they can sell more goods to their consumers. The kind of innovation I’m talking about, however, is the kind that helps us connect to our workforce in a comprehensive, sustainable way.

You’ve probably heard the wildly popular saying from the famous Hollywood movie Glengarry Glen Ross: “Always be closing,” right? Well, we’re updating that to “Always be innovating” because one thing is for sure — technology has made business continuity possible during the pandemic. Without things like Zoom, Slack, and other communications tools that allow workers to be anywhere in the world yet connected, none of us would have been able to survive. Business as a whole would have stopped entirely, and it’s highly likely that many, many more people would have already died from COVID-19.

While many of these tools may not have been heavily utilized in our day-to-day interactions before COVID, their importance has become crystal clear as the pandemic has stretched on. Without compliance officers, HR, and other company leaders working together to implement tools like these that help smooth remote work transitions and ease communications and technology knowledge transfer across different locales and time zones, COVID would have absolutely wrecked businesses. That simply underlines the idea that we, as business leaders, must continually innovate in places that we think are staid and true — places like remote work and technology tools.

This point also underscores my earlier statement about tending to the health and mental wellness of your employees. In many cases, because schools have also been closed, parents have needed to be home to ensure that their kids are getting to remote classes and doing their schoolwork every single day. Corporations must put the needs of their employees front and center; otherwise, their businesses are doomed. Employees won’t sacrifice the well-being of their families for a corporation, so corporations must adapt and keep employees at the center of their business work if they want to retain and hire the best and the brightest.

Know Your Role in Society

Lenders and big banks aren’t known for putting their customers first, though many of their slogans and taglines make you think that they do. A select few stepped up during the pandemic to soften some of their lending practices and support people so they could stay in their homes and finance their businesses. Banks like Wells Fargo offered programs to help keep small businesses afloat. Hewlett-Packard provided deep discounts on their products to help students in need get the technology to take classes online. In both cases, corporate leaders knew their role in society and prioritized their social responsibility during the crisis.

This crisis has demonstrated (and continues to) that customers and the market will not suffer those who take advantage of them. Companies have a social responsibility to their employees and their customers, and those who neglect it are sure to collapse quickly, especially in the face of such total global upheaval.

The Bottom Line

The global COVID-19 pandemic impacts everyone. It’s changed how we do business, how we interact with one another, and how we school our kids. It’s likely to have varied and wide-reaching effects for years to come. Compliance officers and their teams need to continue to learn from both the biggest failures and the biggest wins other companies have had as we all carefully navigate the ongoing crisis. There is no guarantee that we won’t make mistakes, but the best plan of action is to tread carefully and thoughtfully and always keep your employees at the center of your strategy. After all, they are your biggest asset and your biggest advocates. If you can learn from others’ missteps and wins in your industry, you are likely to come out of this strange time on top.