Transcript for Calculating, Understanding, Demonstrating & Leveraging ROI
Nick Gallo: Hey, guys. Welcome to the EthicsVerse. We are doing an ROI CUDL-sesh. So that’s calculating, understanding, demonstrating, and leveraging ROI. Super excited for our big EthicsVerse episode this week. This is something that’s been requested a lot. We’ve gotten a lot of traction with helping folks out. Before we dive into this, I want to remind everybody to jump into the chat, and please share where you’re from. We always want these sessions to be highly interactive. We hope that this session is going to be one that’s going to knock your socks off. And there’s going to be a lot of great information in here that you’re gonna be able to download. So in the next day or so, the replay is going to be available, the slide deck is going to be available. And we’re even working on a special eBook for you that’s going to put a lot of these things into practice, and basically allow you to apply some of this stuff inside your own organization. So please highlight in the chat if you have specific questions, because I’m presenting and we don’t have somebody else here. Me and Gio are both presenting.
Our team’s going to share those questions that we need to address directly in Slack. But yeah, let’s please participate here. And this is our big giveaway. So our big EthicsVerse giveaway, we’re gonna be giving away $25,000 in prizes today. And as always, that’s going to come from participation. So the more questions you ask, the more contributions you make, the more you do to reinforce this network, the bigger your odds are to win. Our big giveaways today are, as always, the world-famous EthicsVerse book giveaway. You get to make a selection. We’re giving 20 away. Four times what we usually do. We’re giving 20 books away from our special ethics and compliance library. We’re also giving away three full ROI sessions. We started to sell these for about 8K each. And so we’re giving three of those away. And finally, for one lucky winner, a thousand-dollar Amazon gift card. That’s a flat screen, you know what I’m saying? That’s something good from Amazon. A thousand-dollar Amazon gift card or a thousand-dollar donation to an organization of your choice. All those winners will be announced at the end or after… You know, you’ll get notified, they’ll be announced after the webinar.
And so with that, I’m here with my brother, Gio. Gio is a…some say that he’s the brains of this whole operation. So, Gio has a background in finance and accounting. And he has a background in private equity. And he really drives a lot of our technology initiatives forward. When Gio and I… I’m Nick. Hi, how’s it going?
Giovanni Gallo: Hey, Nick? Glad you’re here today.
Nick: Thank you. Thank you. So I also have a background in finance and accounting. And when Gio and I got into this industry, I think we were really struck by how big of an opportunity this ROI discussion is. Gio, talk to us a little bit about, you know, the time that we’ve spent in board meetings and things like that, and how we started to see folks get that wrong.
Gio: Oh, I mean, I’ve lost track of all the time I’ve spent in board meetings. But, you know, really, Nick and I have both been blessed to spend a lot of our career in these types of discussions. Even, you know, kind of my first year out of college, I was working at a firm where we were helping companies make these big board level decisions, and got to sit in and see what those were like. And I think that it took us a little while after we got into compliance to realize how distant some people are in compliance from those conversations. And what we’ve realized, and what we’ve really distilled into this presentation today, is there are certain dynamics, there are certain ways to present information, there are certain ways to make your case, and to ask for things, and to anticipate your audience, and things like that, that really make those board level discussions, those, you know, requests for a budget, or the pitch for why we need this new tool or whatever it is. There’s some approaches that Nick and I have seen, you know, dozens and dozens of times, go well and go not so well in that kind of board or that executive level presentation.
That if as a compliance leader, you don’t know how to speak that language, or you don’t know how the presentation of your request for budget should be different from the presentation of the results of your audit, then you’re probably leaving a lot on the table that is not just leaving budget on the table, but leaving that buy in and that invitation to be the high impact leader and expert in your domain that we all know that you are, but you maybe don’t get credit for it, if you’re not approaching it this way. And there are some things we’re going to be talking about today, some behavioral psychology, some ways to present numbers, some easy ways to really paint a vision for how compelling of a transformation can come from the compliance and ethics team. We hope to empower you with some of those things that are really just a little bit of tweaks, and tips, and changes of your approach that can massively transform the way that you get a response from that presentation. We’ve seen it happen live, in follow up with people, having a really great outcome from the results they get. And we think that if you stick with us throughout this webinar, apply a few of these things, you’ll get improved outcomes as well.
Nick: So yeah, small tweaks. Again, we’re hitting this tipping point in our industry where we’re really going to see a watershed moment, right? And a lot of the groundwork that we’ve laid, we’re going to be building upon now with again, like Gio said, small tweaks to our programs, small tweaks to our mindsets. And those are going to really cause us to elevate and really start to crowdsource risk management, get the budget we need, and make the impact in our organization that we’ve all dreamed for.
Unapologetic ad for ComplianceLine. We have a suite of issue intake, credential monitoring, specialty, and training solutions to help make your ethics and compliance initiatives really soar. So if you’re interested, please reach out, we’d love to partner, or even help if you’re in a different provider. There’s some ideas that we have to really create some leverage points for you. So, here’s our agenda. We’re going to go through a case study. We want to make this very interactive. And let me just back up. We’ve had some great success with this framework. We’ve had some folks starting to reach out to us to help them get ready for board meetings. Let me give you two quick anecdotes on the successes that we’ve had. Some of these things we’ve pulled from to help model this case study that we’re going to go through together.
So one was a friend of ours, you know, this guy’s become a friend of ours, at a large Fortune 500 company that was even on the “Ethisphere” list of most ethical organizations. I thought that those people had a blank check for their ethics and compliance needs. Turns out, they’re very much like you. A lot of the pains that he had were, you know, echoed across other folks that are not on that list. And their company was in a hiring freeze. Long story short, we spent several hours together building a case together, that he was able to go to his board. And he got three new heads in the midst of that hiring freeze. Another friend who’s, you know, again, become a friend, was stepping into a new role, and really was able to help reframe what ethics and compliance can do within the minds of his board members, by doing some of these little tweaks like we’re talking about.
So, with that, let’s dive into the… We’re going to talk about the fact pattern. We’re gonna talk about the broad problem that we see here. We’re gonna talk about some frameworks and data points that you can use, again, when you download this presentation. You can hold on to these and you can use these to start weaving your own case, as you drive that persuasion path forward. And finally, we’re going to wrap up the case study. Questions along the way are great. Drop those, like I said, into the chat, and let’s get moving. What do you say, Gee?
Gio: Yeah, let’s go.
Nick: All right. So we’re gonna keep coming back to this framework throughout the presentation. And this is the Compliance 3.0 framework. So when compliance first started back in 1996, or back in the 90s, it was really all about keeping the boss out of jail, keeping the company out of the headlines. As we move towards a going concern, as ethics and compliance became a going concern in our organizations, and it wasn’t an actual department, the focus shifted towards efficiency. How can we get some tools in place that help us do our jobs better? How can we get some dashboards so we can see some cool pie graphs when we log into our tools, so that we can increase efficiency and move these rocks across the yard with less effort? The DOJ is talking about it now, we’re talking about it now, you’re thinking about it now. We’re moving towards an era of effectiveness, where the efforts that we are putting forth should actually translate into behavior change. This is not just about having a policy for a policy’s sake, not having just a box to tick, but really having a program that drives the effectiveness that’s going to alter the behaviors within our organization.
So, I’m laying this groundwork now, we’re laying this groundwork now, so that you can see this now weave through, we’re setting the stage for the rest of this presentation. So, Gio, why don’t you take us through this fact pattern? This is what we’re starting with. This is the problem we’re going to be solving throughout the next hour together.
Gio: Yeah. So here’s what we’re going to talk about. Let’s walk through an imaginary scenario. We’re going to do our own little case study together here and talk about that you get into this situation where you’re trying to make a pitch to your senior leadership. So we want to do this so that everyone, as we walk throughout the rest of the session in the webinar, everyone can be thinking about the same thing. And I’m sure you can draw some parallels to what your position is, or how big your team is, or what your budget is. But let’s kind of get a common set of facts that we can work on here.
So, let’s imagine we’re all the new CCO, the new Chief Compliance Officer in a communications business with $2 billion of revenue, and 5000 employees across 10 locations. All right? So we just got this new job, here’s the size of the organization. The person who was here before, we’re kind of stepping in, we just kind of put on their uniform and we’re walking around the place and people are like, “Yeah, the last person who wore that uniform, they didn’t really get it. They accepted compliance as a cost center. You know, they were the island of Dr. No. And, you know, hey, let’s just get some compliance done. It’s a necessary evil.” So that’s what we’re stepping into. That’s kind of the dynamic, and the culture, and the reputation that was filling this role before us.
So before the Great Resignation… So we’re going to talk about some baselines here. Before the Great Resignation happened, the company had a turnover of 17%. And now that’s spiked to 37%. It had a quit rate of 10%, and now that’s spiked to 26%. So, you’re stepping into a place, as a compliance officer, where the makeup, and the inertia, and the stickiness of employees wanting to keep working at this company, has become a lot worse. And then we’re also, throughout this presentation of, you know, staff and requests for budget, we’re going to be talking about employee engagement. So, less than 20% of employees are engaged, right? So that’s the positive one, right? Who’s engaged? Less than 20%. And overall average is an employee engagement rate of 65%. Okay? So that’s kind of the situation. We talked about the culture, the stats, what it’s like for employees, and let’s talk about the budget real quick. The discrimination and harassment litigation spent $600,000 last year on this litigation. And 2 years over the past 10 years had similar activity. And a total of four lawsuits and $3 million spent on this.
So our team has five people on it. You can see us split here. We have one great person, one okay person, and two not so great people, and one person who’s detrimental. So our team has this kind of spread of quality on it. Our case management and our investigation of these discrimination, and harassment, and other types of issues are done by hand, in spreadsheets and email. Our hotline is an internal voicemail. And the only digital way to submit is through email. Policies are kind of ad hoc. Risk assessments are five years old. We’ve been in this job for 90 days. And the board says, “Hey, new Chief Compliance Officer, you’re new here, tell us what your new plan is.” And our board is filled with these kind of old school types, MBAs, finance types, they maybe don’t speak the same language and read the same trade journals that we do. Overall, our compliance budget is $600,000. We’re the new person, we want to drive change. We have a vision of, hey, this should be a lot better. And we want to set the stage and say, “Hey, I’m the new leader here. I want to tell you guys what it’s going to take to solve some problems. And I have an idea what it takes to get there.”
So we want to do these things. We want to spend across here, $200,000. So we’re going to try to take our budget from 600 grand to 800 grand. Pause on that, how often do you make that type of a bid or that type of a request? Does that make you tremble in your boots of, well, that’s more than a 2% increase? How could we ever get something? Or you’re like, yeah, you know, our compliance budget easily grows 30 or more percent each year. We’re going to try to take this from 600 grand to 800 grand by adding these things, issue and taking case management software, risk assessment software, do exit interviews for our employees, and implement a policy management solution.
Nick: We got a great question in the chat, Gee. I want to make sure that we keep moving. But I think this is a really important question, as we start shifting our conversation more away from the check the box stuff, toward the actual effectiveness. And so Brian says, “Changing an organizational culture can be a long-term project. What are your experiences with timelines to get organizations on the right path?” What do you think about that?
Gio: I think you start today, and you expect that it takes two to five years to have massive change. You know, there’s no way that you’re going to put out a press release, paint the walls, give everybody some new swag that says, “Ethics is for everyone,” and then automatically it changes. This is culture, right? Like, think about how long it takes you, personally dedicated to change your own habit. And we’re talking about the habits and the tendencies of a bunch of employees who are not thinking about compliance and ethics 24 hours a day. So, you know, how long does it take to completely change it? Maybe it takes forever. But how long should you wait to get started? Get started right now. But I think you should be able to see some people changing in the next quarter and see some realizable progress. Again, not reinventing the entire culture in a year, but you should be able to track some progress and see some changes to that.
Nick: Yeah. You know, I may think about it a little bit differently, or I may say it a little bit differently. I think it comes a lot faster than people think. I think changing an organizational culture we think is like turning a battleship. And really, it’s more like lighting a match. Because a lot of what we’re talking about in terms of workplaces that are built on actual integrity, places where people can bring their whole selves to work, places where people feel like they’re a part of something. These are all sort of the foundational elements of a highly compliant, highly ethical culture. These are all things that we want to believe, right? These are all things that we want from our workplaces. And those were seeds within us as human beings before we got chewed up and spit out by the machine that is, you know, capitalism, or is the modern-day workplace. So with a little bit of credibility and a little bit of a push, I think we can activate those things. To Gio’s point, it’s gonna take a while to do it, but you’re gonna get some gains very quickly, a lot quicker than you think.
Gio: Yeah, it’s a great point, Nick. I mean, I think that as we get into this presentation and this pitch, you don’t want to promise the board that, “I will completely eliminate all turnover within three months. We’re going to transform the culture with this new case management software.” But you can say, “Hey, we should be able to see something in three to six months. And we should see this starting to work. And you should see this payoff over, you know, a series of quarters.”
Nick: Yeah. And what we’re going to be talking about, we just had another comment that said, “Should we set a baseline to track results?” All we’re talking about is incrementalism. All we’re going to be talking about today is about setting a baseline and showing slight improvements to reinforce the claims that we’re making, which we’re going to get into some more. So, Gio, what are we going to do? And really, what’s at the root of this problem?
Gio: So, I think it’s a couple things. But one is, I think it all comes down to, we as ethics experts, we know what needs to happen, we know what’s straining our team. We know what best practices are that we’ve heard about in getting our CEUs over the past five years, and we haven’t been able to implement. We know what it takes to change our program. We know what we need. But our leaders don’t know. And we have a hard time conveying this in a way that they can adapt it. And you know, some of that is, hey, you know what, I always ask for a $50,000 increase in budget and get 10. So I’m just used to kind of not getting my way or something like that. But, you know, one of the actionable things we’re gonna be talking about today is how to do this ROI speak. This might be a hitch that you have, among other things, cultural or what your leadership thinks, or something like that. But a lot of us, we have a background in something that’s more legal. And, you know, it’s more words than numbers. And we think that, you know, I hated math class, so I’m never going to be able to do a pitch to a CFO.
Today, Nick, and I want to help you dispel those concerns and say, hey, you know what, you can pick this up, and you don’t need to be a CFA or have a master’s degree in advanced Vedic maths in order to get this stuff done right. But even if you don’t like speaking the CFO’s language, you can fight against this branding problem, and help…again, without going back to algebra and trigonometry, figure out how to communicate this thing. This is ultimately leadership. Leadership is influence, influence is communication. And that thing that you have in your heart that if we just had this, our program would run so much better. We want to help you communicate that so it lands at the CFO or the executive or the board, and they say, “Wow, that sounds great. Let’s give you a shot at it.”
Nick: So a lot of us have this aversion to ROI. It’s hard to articulate the return that we’re having. But what I want everybody to recognize is that, ROI is merely a tool for persuasion. And while we’re talking about getting some tools into the mix, in this particular case study, you know, somebody brought up a great point. Kevin said, “Software doesn’t change culture, people do.” And that’s absolutely true. I think software, in many times, or tools that we put in place, or robust training, all these things can be tools to give us indications on where those cultural elements are. And they also, on a secondary basis, can serve as, like, a proof for our commitment to driving the type of culture that we want. But absolutely right, you’re not going to put a poster on the wall, and then everybody automatically feel different. So, hey, Tom, how are you doing? A round of applause for Tom Fox, our good friend. The voice of compliance. If you don’t check out Tom on any of the podcasts, get familiar.
So ROI is a tool for persuasion. And it’s a simple formula, right? It’s the return divided by the investment. And it’s basically the return relative to the cost for a particular investment. I want to talk a little bit about this motivation triad, because what I have found is that everything that we do is some is some mix, everything we buy, everything we do is driven by one of these corners of this motivation triad. And so those are three things. It’s to avoid pain, it’s to conserve energy, and it’s to seek pleasure. So if you look at a commercial that’s resonated with you, or the last purchase you made, or your house or any of those things, it’s some mix of all these things. And what we found is that in many of these conversations, what folks end up tending to do is focusing on the pain avoidance piece, the regulatory risk, the kinds of fines that we’re going to avoid and that we need to avoid in order to justify our investment in these things. So, think about the last time somebody sold something to you or think about the last pitch you made to the board, or to your boss to get something. If you’re just focusing on one of those things, you’re going to leave a lot of dollars on the table.
And, you know, we talk about, there’s three ways to make appeals to somebody, there’s three ways to persuade. There’s logical appeals, emotional appeals, and cooperative appeals. And so the point of all of this is that we need to add another dimension. Just like a great dish of food has multiple flavor profiles, a great persuasion dish is going to have multiple flavor profiles, and it’s going to pull on different motivations in the top track and in the persuasion path, in order to resonate with a larger audience. And so, you know, we often come back to this rhetorical triangle. And, you know, this is…you heard of Aristotle? Okay, so this is his rhetorical triangle. And every message is going to be some mix of these things. It’s gonna have an emotional appeal, it’s going to have an ethical appeal, and a logical appeal. What we have found in general, and the hundreds of board meetings that we’ve sat through, and the hundreds of presentations of people coming in, clutching their paper, you know, reading facts and figures off of a page. What we found is these oversample into the logical piece of the puzzle. So obviously, logic is important. Obviously, we need to be logical. But being devoid of pathos, emotion, being devoid of the ethical appeals, without sounding preachy, really compromises a lot of our effectiveness. So, Gio, talk to us about this phrase, logic makes you think, emotion makes you act.
Gio: Yeah, well, I mean, the thing here is, if your presentation is just facts, facts, facts, facts, then there’s not that emotion in it. There’s not someone saying, hey, you know what, this is great for our company. We really want to do this. And also what a board is used to doing is they’re used to looking at a array of absolutely rock-solid facts, that’s history, kind of easily predictable going forward, you know, facts, and we should do this. And then also, hey, here’s the upside, or here’s what we can do, or here’s…if this thing goes well, it’ll be this great. And on average, it’ll be this. And, you know, if it goes poorly, it’ll at least be this good. If you’re just only on that facts piece, and you’re only stating something that only you know for sure you have a 99.99% chance of achieving, well, not only are you not painting a picture that will be emotionally, or in the ethos, like, we just should do this because it’s going to be right. You’re also putting yourself on a footing that is going to be poorly compared to other presentations coming to the board.
If the board is sitting in a presentation and the marketing team is saying, “Let’s spend $2 million on a Super Bowl ad, it’s gonna be great. And we’re not really sure how but, like, we should just do it, we just should.” Preaching ethos. “And it’s going to be so great. Everyone’s going to know about us.” You know, having some of that pathos. And then the IT team is coming in, right? The CTO comes in and says, “Hey, you know what, we need to get to the cloud. And this is going to let us innovate. And this is what’s going to be great for the company.” Great, you got some logic, you got some ethos, you have some pathos in there. And then they come to the compliance team and we just say, “Okay, well, you know, we found this thing, and we need to do this, and we need another $3,000 next year.” Well, they’re gonna say, “That was exciting. That was exciting. Okay, well, can we get through with this, because this isn’t transforming the company?” We need to put some emotionality into this. And we can be, you know, to go back to the last slide, we can talk about the risk of something, or how it’s going to make them proud to be at the company, or something like that.
But if it’s just only on the facts, you’re not only going to leave some people saying, okay, well, you know, there’s really nothing to talk about here, and there’s nothing interesting here. You know, yes, maybe you get half the budget or whatever. You’re also comparing yourself to some other emotional appeals, a presentation by the CTO or the CMO, that is exciting and enticing, and feels like it’s moving the company forward. And then, you know, round three comes when the CCO comes in, and it lands flat. And if you don’t have some of that excitement, if you don’t have some of those things that say, hey, you know what, here’s why if we spend this money, you’re going to feel better about leading this company, then that might be one of the reasons why you’re not getting your budget approved.
Nick: So, great points, we have to have those different flavor profiles. So, in group persuasion, very few times are we in this game talking to one person. We need to get some kind of a sense of who we’re talking to. And we need to get some kind of a sense of the audience that we’re talking to. So, when we are trying to persuade anybody and we’re recognizing that I need budget, I want something that I don’t have, I must persuade somebody, I cannot compel somebody to do it. That persuasion model is first identifying the audience, which is, it could be one person, it could be more multiple people. Understand what they want and need, build some trust with them, and explain how what you want is a win-win relative to those wants and needs. It’s a very simple thing, but just failing to go through that exercise and failing to recognize the role that trust plays in this equation is critical, or is a big downfall.
You know, this is another way to talk about trust. Trust is such a driver, especially when we want to become a trusted adviser in our organizations. And we are naturally going to increase credibility and reliability, probably by just our personality and the role that we’re in. Somebody who’s a smart ethics and compliance leader, they already have credibility, unless you’re just a total charlatan, and you have no business being in the role, right? So we can increase trust, though, by driving intimacy. That’s like a person to person connection, by building actual relationships, and by driving down this denominator, this cell focus. If I’m focused on the other person, and really trying to understand what their needs are, it’s going to be a great information download to me to better speak to them and give them what they need. But focusing on the other person and focusing on this broader audience, to go back to that last slide, is really a superpower in driving our things forward. Gio, talk to us…
Gio: Before we get too far, I have to big up, Shelly for jumping in and saying… I just love this quote, I’m gonna get a T-shirt of this. “Compliance is not just facts, it’s telling the story that resonates with the audience and inspires them to act.” That’s what we’re talking about here. It’s awesome. Like, we need to just do a webinar about that.
Nick: Someone got a book with that one, someone got a book with that one.
Gio: But it’s a great point because ultimately, compliance is leadership, compliance is culture. We’re trying to affect people’s behavior. And we don’t just do it with facts, we affect people’s behavior, whether it’s the board’s behavior, or someone responding to a policy, or someone adopting behavior that we teach them in training. We want to resonate with them, make it relatable, and make it something that changes their action. And facts are not the only way to change somebody’s action. So thank you for that, Shelley…Three thousand bonus points for that one, Nick.
Nick: Ooh, those spend anywhere, Shelley. So hold on to those bonus points. Those are good ones.
Gio: So, this is a really important slide. I think this is something that as we’ve coached people on this, and as we’ve done ROI workshops with people, it opens up their mind to how, you know, like, to just guess, or put some shorthand on it, maybe some of us feel like, if we’re saying something that is not completely reliable, it’s unethical because we don’t actually completely know it. And what we want to encourage you to do is, A, the board is used to hearing estimates and handicaps, and saying, this will probably be this good, or, you know, like, let me try it and we’ll see how it goes. They’re used to dealing with that uncertainty. And also, we need to kind of get out of the weeds or the trees, and show them the forest and say, “Hey, you know what, I don’t know exactly how this is going to turn out. But this isn’t heading in the right direction, and there’s a chance for it to be great. But even if it’s not great, it’s going to be plenty good. And we’re going to get enough return on it.” We need to be able to communicate things that are not just, you know, the 1.0 stuff, the Compliance 1.0, keep the boss out of jail, legal fines and stuff like that, that’s easily knowable.
As you move up to 2.0 and 3.0, it’s a little bit more squishy. But it’s not only, okay, you have to do this in a board setting to get that emotional appeal, to set the stage, to set the vision and say, “Hey, this is where we’re going after.” And you have to be more comfortable talking about things that you can’t absolutely guarantee will be delivered in 60 days or less or your money back. But you’d have to set that stage and say it’s going to be something like this. And once we get into it, then we’ll know how close we are to it.
Nick: Yeah. And what that means is just using expected value thinking. So this is expected value thinking, this is what you need to do.
Gio: Yeah, easy. So just memorize that equation.
Nick: So just do this Greek, just kidding. Expected value thinking is really just a bunch of simple multiplication. So, picture this game, a game costs $2 bucks. It’s a heads or tails game. You got a 50% odds of heads, obviously, or tails. You get $10 bucks if you win heads, you get zero bucks if you hit tails. So what’s the expected value of the game? Well, I’m just multiplying out the occurrence, the odds of each of these outcomes occurring, and I’m adding them together. So the expected value of the game is $3 bucks. So the point is, we can’t see the future. ROI is just a bunch of multiplication and addition. It’s just a bunch of fodder for persuasion. It’s not this bizarre alchemy that only, you know, CPAs and finance pros can use. It’s one of many arrows in your quiver to get what it is you need to get done for your organization.
And we’re gonna go quick through this one. But, you know, for some reason, human beings, we’re very good at understanding complex problems. And we do that in our lives all the time. We know that if we get… You know, if we’re trying to lose some weight, we are going to just get a healthy lifestyle, and we’re going to get our steps in every day, and we’re going to start eating salads, and maybe not drink the beer or whatever. Four months from now, after you hit your goal, you’re never going to look back and say, which of these salads corresponded to the one pound that I lost in this 20-pound weight loss activity that I was on? Of course, you don’t do that because you know it’s a confluence of healthy lifestyle choices that lead to this outcome and this goal that you’re trying to get to. For some reason, we can understand that in terms of our own individual health, but we bring this sort of one-dimensional thinking into our organization. And what Gio and I are trying to change your mindset on, is that, don’t let this attribution trap derail you and be a hindrance for the kind of persuasion that you can drive.
And what we’re talking about is being able to incorporate into the conversation, the indirect impact of the efforts that we make. Of course, driving an ethical culture is great to point to. But, like, that shows up all over the place. It shows up in employee engagement, and it shows up in things beyond the fines that we have eliminated, and the things beyond the discrimination lawsuit rate falling through the floor. So we have to get confidence, we have to increase our confidence interval around things that we’re willing to sort of take credit for, and bring a wider net for the attribution of the things that we impact.
Okay, let’s jump into some data points. The first and foremost, most important piece of the puzzle…it’s two. One is, how big is your organization? Many times we talk to folks and they are, like, in a panic about going to the CFO and asking for $100,000 or $200,000. And most of the time, when I ask an ethics and compliance or human resource person, “Well, what’s your company revenue?” They’re like, “I don’t know.” Well, that is a very, very critical piece of the puzzle. So here’s some high-level numbers and estimates heuristics that you can use to kind of estimate it, if your company’s not public and that information just isn’t out there on a website. But you have to have some idea of the sheer scale of what you’re dealing with. How much revenue is pouring through your organization? You’re entitled to a piece of that. So we went on Gartner, and we saw that this is the average spend across ethics and compliance department budgets across different organization sizes. And what you can see here is that, in all of these cases, per Gartner, again, per Gartner… So let me back up. This table is basically showing you employee size as estimated revenue for organizations at that employee size, the annual assumed budget per Gartner, and the percentage of revenue that that average ethics and compliance department has relative to the broader P&L of the entire organization.
And then in the last column over here, we put this in terms of $100,000. So what this is saying is that, if you make $100,000, the average ethics and compliance budget is equivalent to you going out for drinks and appetizers once. Those aren’t big needle movers, that’s not a new mortgage. We’re talking about a very small number that’s not going to really move the needle from the organization’s perspective. But again, this is why we get so passionate and excited about ethics and compliance, because small dollars, small tweaks to these programs, and these things that are in place, can drive massive impacts in our organization. And our mindsets are such a limiting factor. You know, like we always say, we build whatever prison that we live in. And if we think that the number we’re asking for is a really big number, well, guess what, they’re gonna think it’s a big number, and that’s going to feel fishy. If we can remind them that the numbers that we’re asking about, and the numbers that we need to do our job most effectively, and do the job that they’ve asked us to do are actually just crumbs on the side of the table, we’re going to feel a lot more confident asking for it.
So this, again, does that same thing in saying, hey, you know, I need a new $100,000 tool. Well, that sounds like a lot of money, that’s a lot of money to me, for sure. But again, whether it’s a 2500-person organization, or it’s a 50,000-person organization, you can see what the impact is, again, on that $100,000 per person in those terms. I’m sure you have a purse, or I’m sure you have a jacket hanging in your closet that has a $5 bill in it or a $10 bill in it. That’s what we’re talking about to get the tool that you need. So we have to come with boldness, we have to come with confidence to get the thing that we want. What I’m really talking about is grabbing the steering wheel of life and exhibiting some agency. I’m talking about grabbing the chair that we’re sitting in at the kiddie table, and pulling that up to the grown folks table where we belong.
So, we’re going to run through a bunch of these data points. We have about, you know, whatever, 20 minutes, 25 minutes left. The next few slides are going to be a bunch of these data points that, again, I encourage you to download this presentation and hold on to some of these things. These are all cited, so you can feel confident using them in any of your talk tracks, but they’re really eye openers, and will help. And then again, we’re going to be pulling those into our case study to build this really compelling ROI case. So here are some of the costs to defend a discrimination lawsuit. Two out of three that go to trial end up going to the plaintiffs. Employee cost. Many times we don’t think about how much employees in our organizations cost. The average employee cost across the economy is 51K, about $52,000. And that’s based on a median salary of about 35K. But the salary that we pay out the door to an employee, that an organization pays out the door to an employee, that’s not the fully loaded cost of an employee, right? The fully loaded cost of an employee also incorporates all the taxes and all the benefits and things like that. And those tend to range to about 25% or 40% over and above that. The average HR and E&C comp is between 60 and 80 for ADP. Gio, let’s start talking about employee engagement. Because this is, like, such a freaking needle mover that a lot of us don’t really think about and are not comfortable taking credit for because it seems so hard to quantify.
Gio: Yeah. Maybe it seems hard to quantify, or maybe we think, oh, well, we’re not responsible for that. You know, that’s an HR thing, or that’s a management and operations thing. Listen, this is the stuff that’s gonna get you that emotional appeal. This is the stuff that’s gonna get you, you know, hey, we saved you 100 grand, because that person who you’ve never heard of, is probably not suing you this year. This is the kind of stuff that, again, we all know in our hearts, that if someone’s retaliated against, it’s terrible for employee engagement. We all know in our hearts that if our compliance program isn’t running, and our ethics program isn’t vibrant, then employees, they’re not engaged, and they don’t like working at the company, and they don’t trust the people they work with. This is the stuff that you have to talk about. If this is not a line item on why your budget is justified, you have to wrap your head around this concept. We’ll give you a preview here, and you can dig into it more. We’d be glad to help.
So, disengaged employees, these are people, especially if you’re in a knowledge work economy, where their discretionary effort is less than it could be, right? So maybe they take a longer lunch or they go slow through their work, or they’re a little bit sloppy, and there’s some errors and they go back to it. Disengaged employees cost $3,400 for every $10,000 in annual salary. So if you want to hit up your CFO and say, hey, what’s the total salary for our whole company? Maybe it’s 400 grand, maybe it’s 40 million, or 3 billion, or whatever it is. Take 34% of that and that’s what the cost of disengagement is. So we can-
Nick: Assuming average disengagement in your organization. Look, you may work at WD40, where the engagement rate is 89, or whatever it was, 92%. That’s a crazy high number. But if you’re kind of average, and you have an average turnover rate, it’s safe to assume that there is a relatively high level of employee disengagement. Sorry to cut you off, Gio.
Gio: No, I mean, this is just average. And it might be worse for you. And we’ll talk about how much of that we can take credit for. But the point is, it’s a massive amount. Okay? So there’s a bunch of money being lost because employees are not engaged. And I think if you’re in compliance and ethics, you got to believe that the work that we do has an impact on employees, how they view the company, and how they do the work. That’s what we’re here for. Go ahead.
Nick: No, I was just gonna say that this is a crippling cost that most of our organizations have gotten used to dealing with, right? We talk about, you know, trying to ride the Tour de France with tires that are only 68% full, you’re expending a lot of extra effort there to not move down the road as fast as you would like. And what I think is kind of interesting that I hope is not kind of lost on everybody is that, the $3400 per $10,000 is kind of the same as the 35% U.S. engagement rate, or the 68% global engagement rate. These are all kind of the same numbers, we’re looking at them from different angles. So the point is that there is a ton of deadweight loss in our organizations. So deadweight loss is just the waste that’s in a system when the level of engagement in this particular example is lower than what we would expect. You know, your organizations are paying out a full salary, and they’re expecting a full level of work. To the extent that people are putting less effort into the mix than that which they’re being paid for, then this triangle exists in every single organization. Because essentially, you’re expecting a certain quantity of work. This is just ECON 101. Okay?
So you’re expecting a certain quantity of work, and instead, you’re getting a lower quantity of work. So the work that you’re expecting is costing a lot more than you kind of signed up for. So, like this last slide says, I mean, it just shows up everywhere. The cost of employee disengagement shows up in sales acceleration, it shows up in gross margin, it shows up in turnover, it shows up in the extra effort that people are willing to spend to keep that job or earn that paycheck. It shows up in the culture. I mean, it just shows up on and on and on. But the point is that, to the extent… So the point is that, this triangle exists in every organization. To the extent that our ethical cultures can affect the size of that triangle and shrink it, all of that falls directly to the bottom line, which we’re gonna see some more on the cost of turnover here.
Gio: Yeah. So, we’re talking about two things here. How expensive is it for someone to be disengaged, right? That’s like someone taking three hours out of their day and not working, but you pay them for it. But it’s in that discretionary effort piece. And also, when there’s turnover, you guys probably know this if you’ve managed a team and you lost somebody on your team, or they quit, or you had to fire them, or whatever. What are all the things that are costly about turnover? Well, that position isn’t filled, and it buries your team in extra work. And you have to spend time recruiting and interviewing. And then you need to spend time onboarding. And you lose some of that knowledge and that organizational tie-in from that person. So, employees not being engaged is costly, turnover is costly. It might take a new employee six to nine months to ramp up. It might take six to nine months of their salary that, you know, it’s almost a full year of salary in order to get that position refilled. Or depending on what you look at, that cost might be one and a half to two times the employee’s annual salary, and that gap of six to nine months.
The point is that, there is a lot that your board, your CEO, your CFO, are already dealing with about employee turnover and employee disengagement, that they’re trying to figure out. They’re looking around and saying, “Hey, marketing, can you help with this? Hey, can the PR team do something about this? Hey, HR, what have you done about this?” We can step up into this forum and say, “Hey, guys, are you concerned about employee turnover? Hey, have you thought about the cost of employees being disengaged? Well, in case you are, and you want to impact our quit rates, or impact our employee retention, compliance has a solution to this problem that you guys have probably under-invested in. And we want to help make this better.” And where we’re going with this everyone is that, if you have that type of approach, and you say, hey, you’re concerned about this, you’re probably asking other people instead of us for help with this. We can help solve this problem that you have, not just the, hey, we might have gotten sued three years ago, but this thing, it’s impacting our innovation, it’s impacting our growth, it’s impacting our sales performance, it’s impacting the quality on our production line, whatever it is. We can help with that, and also not be the company where we lose all of our best people. So you need to put this into your pitch, you need to put this into your presentation, into why it’s worth spending another 50 grand out of the $3 billion of revenue we have each year. Let’s spend another 50 grand on this solution. It’s going to help these things.
Nick: And also, you got to get opportunistic here. I mean, this is on top of mind for everybody. So we’ve been working in this industry for a long time. Everybody on here has a passion for trying to leave things better and make the world a better place. We’ve been trying to create ethical workplaces. Guess what? It matters now. Okay? And it’s on the mind, to Gio’s point, of the board. It’s on the mind of the CEO. It’s on the mind of the whole C-suite. How do we stop this brain drain? How do we stop this massive turnover that’s washing across our organizations? And I’m telling you, the full cost of the Great Resignation has not hit our businesses yet because of all those things that we were talking about. The cultural leakage, the knowledge leaving the organization, the workplace trauma that people are bringing in from their last experiences. What do you think they were leaving? They jumped the fence to a pasture where they hoped the grass was greener. So that’s another opportunity for us to not only show them that this culture is different and that this organization is different. But it’s also a time, to Gio’s point, to raise our hands and show the C-suite, show the board that our impact is well beyond the safety belt that we are in the car of commerce.
Sixty two percent of people were quitting during the Great Resignation because they didn’t believe the company’s mission. We heard in the ECI report this spring, 82% of people experienced actual retaliation, right? That’s explicit and implicit retaliation, that’s 82%. Of course, people are leaving. Labor mobility is higher than it’s ever been. The cost of changing jobs is lower than it’s ever been. People in this generation, now more than ever care about the cultures that they work in, the missions that their organizations pursue. And if there’s an actual authentic push to close that gap between the aspirational culture, and the aspirational mission, and what people live out every single day. So, look, if you don’t believe everything I’m saying, then you need to find a different job. Okay? I’m kidding, of course. But there’s so much data behind this. Like, “Ethisphere” just put out a couple of months ago, this 25% ethics premium. This has continued to rise over and over through different cycles. As you can see, it’s 25% ethical premium. So, you know, if you don’t want to trace back to all these different little sort of composite pieces, just you have to understand that there is a statistically significant outperformance of ethical organizations in the public sphere.
You think this isn’t higher in the private sphere? It absolutely is. So my point is, there’s so many things for us to pull from, and now you’re going to see how we weaponize all this data in our persuasion path as we wrap up over the next, you know, 12 or so minutes, into this case study. So we went through this fact pattern, you guys have sure already remember all this because you’re all extremely smart photographic memories, etc. We want to spend 200K, what are we going to do? Well, we’re going to use this framework to build out the numerator of our ROI conversation. And what this is going to do, it’s going to pull from our motivation triad, it’s going to pull from Aristotle’s triangle, and it’s going to incorporate different motivations and different sounds, different tunes that are going to resonate with different people in this complex, you know, board scenario that we’re talking about.
Gio: Yeah, let me give a little context here. So we’re going to be talking about you motivating a purchase decision with this board that they’re not used to hearing from you. But we’re all used to buying things like this all the time. So a lot of us buy, or rent, or lease cars, right? And there are kind of these elements to all of it. The 1.0, the risk avoidance says, hey, if you get this new car, you’re not going to have to do as much maintenance. Your alternator might not break within the next few years. How often is that enough to motivate you to say, yeah, you know what, give me a new car note. I’d love to do that. It’s not enough. Just, you know, reduced maintenance isn’t enough to get you to buy a car. But then you’re gonna talk about some efficiency. “Hey, you’re not gonna have to do all that maintenance, you don’t have to worry about it. Your car’s not gonna be in the shop, you know, once every other month. But also think about how more efficient this is going to be. Your mile per gallon is gonna go up. You’re gonna be able to drive more and not spend as much on gas.” You’re like, “Okay, now you kind of got me. I’m kind of interested in not the bad stuff and a little bit more efficiency. But I probably just kind of keep the car.”
And then they say, “Well, hey, how about all of this effectiveness? How about how nice it’s going to be to drive this car? How about how much you can fit in it, and look how big the boot is?” That’s the trunk in England. “And look how many cupholders it has. And look how cool you’re gonna look pulling up to soccer practice or the club in this car.” And then when you have, okay, the bad stuff’s not gonna happen, okay, efficient, I’m kind of getting in there, and then you cap it off with and look how good it is, then you’re going to make a purchase. So we’re going to be talking about how to motivate a purchase decision in the same way that motivates you to buy a bunch of other things in your life.
Nick: So our ROI, again, is our numerator of the return, our denominator is the cost. How many dollars are we putting out to get this return that’s in the numerator? And our numerator is gonna break into three different pieces. It’s gonna break into our Compliance 1.0, risk measures, our Compliance 2.0, efficiency measures, and Compliance 3.0, cultural measures. Now, listen, you don’t obviously present this… You don’t have to… I mean, I guess you can. You don’t have to present this in this framework. It’s just a framework for you to start to fill in the gaps and start to think about how you can apply this framework across your business. Okay? So here’s…let’s start with our denominator. Step one, how much do we want to spend? We say we want to spend 200K on a bunch of extra tools that are gonna help us be more effective and more effectively drive forward our culture of our ethical culture. Okay.
So, let’s first start with that first piece, what’s our 1.0 return? So, again, this is all about risk mitigation. If you remember, last year, we settled 600K in lawsuits. I’m sorry, we defended 600K in lawsuits, and we had a similar settlement… I mean, last year we had a settlement of $3 million. So in total, last year, we spent $3.6 million defending and settling discrimination and harassment lawsuits. And we had two other instances of that over the last 10 years. So that kind of averages out to a 1.8 per year that we’re spending to defend and settle discrimination and harassment lawsuits over a 10-year period. So somebody asked in the… Jermaine asked, “How do we demonstrate that it is our work specifically, that has increased engagement, and therefore reduced turnover to the extent that we have impacted this percentage?” So it’s a phenomenal question.
Gio: I love this question.
Nick: And so, you know, part of this is all about the persuasion of it. So you have to make a compelling case that they eat and digest and turn a light bulb on to see that, okay, there’s a connection between these efforts, and these dollars, and this function, and this outcome that I want. So if you go back to my analogy about eating salad every day, translating into your health goals, well, you’re not gonna be able to attribute it directly, but you can show that this confluence of healthy behaviors can drive that outcome. So the best way to do that is by establishing first, this connection, right? Establish the what sort of the audience wants, right? Like, what does the workforce want? They want an ethical culture and, you know, you can pull from some of those stats. You can show that this connection is something that you can affect. And then you have to persuasively, you know, get them to buy into what some movements on that front are, which you’ll see in a couple of slides. But it’s a great question, because that’s really where the rubber meets the road. That’s what the name of the game is. We can talk about all these stats and whatever, but if they don’t buy into that connection of, if I pull down this rope and this bucket moves up from this pulley, then you’re going to be kind of spinning your wheels. But I think bringing them into that process and brainstorming through, bringing them into how this math works is really a great way to get the buy in. And we’ll show you some examples of that. So, anyways…
Gio: Yeah. And just to clarify here, this does not have to be a one for one relationship, right?
Nick: Correct. Good point.
Gio: When the marketing team says, let’s get a new CRM, or let’s spend this money on some new data, or let’s do a website rewrite. They’re not saying, and this page of the website is gonna get us an extra $120,000 of sales. And this button that we’re putting on the website is gonna get us 15 new patients a day. They’re not doing that. No one is doing that. Well, all you have to convey is, you should be saying this, like, “Hey, guys, I don’t expect any questions about this. We can talk about it if you want. But obviously, if employees don’t think we’re ethical, and don’t buy into our values, they’re going to be less engaged. You get that, right? Okay, so we’re going in that direction.” And you just have to… This just has to be one of the things on the scale. You don’t have to show exactly, when we put this on, you know, engagement moves up 2%. Because no one else is doing that. When the technology team comes and says, “Hey, you know what, we need to get some new servers in the cloud, or we need to do to this.” They’re not tying that into, and this is going to lead to a 0.286% increase in revenue, and then this next thing is going here. Both these things go in the same direction. So you just need to establish that.
And as you see, there’s so much positive impact that compliance and ethics can have on the organization that you don’t need to get down to the individual grains of sand on the scales. There’s so much… And this is what I started talking about today. We each know that we have a potential for a massive impact on the quality of life in the organization, how the employees live at work, and the ultimate success of the organization. That’s what gets us hyped up to be part of this every day. We know it in our hearts, we just need to convey that. And you don’t need to convey it, each dollar that you spend on this is going to support this much in the change of engagement. They just need to be both pushing in the same direction. And you can invite the conversation, if they say, I need some data that shows me that ethical companies are valued more. Cool, check out slide 14 in our presentation, or, you know, get some backup for that. You want people to ask those questions. That means that they’re engaged in this dialogue that you have, instead of just, you know, kind of saying yes or no to a budget request.
Nick: But to Jermaine’s great point, critical point to understand, that’s that horseshoe and hand grenade’s point to some degree. But Jermaine, let’s look at this kind of fact pattern here. We’re spending on average, 1.8 million, in this case, to defend and settle discrimination and harassment lawsuits. Okay, are we saying that as soon as we get a speak up, listen up solution in place and get buy in from the organization, that those are just gonna go away? Well, of course not. That’s not that persuasive. I don’t even believe that. But can we say that a 20% assumption is okay? That seems kind of reasonable. So that’s all we’re assuming here. So we’re assuming a 20% reduction in the cost, the annual expense that we’re incurring to defend this. And there’s 360K of our return. So obviously, 20 or 30, or whatever, different things depending on your particular organization, can serve to be part of this first piece of the 1.0 risk reduction, you know, part of the return.
2.0, let’s talk about efficiency. So, again, there’s 100 different ways to cut it. An easy way to cut it is to say, okay, well, how much efficiency is this going to generate on my team? I have a team of five. On average, we’re… You know, remember, we said it’s about 25% to 40% above the, you know, for benefits and taxes and stuff like that. So we’re spending about 85K per person. On our E&C team, there’s five of us, we’re spending 422K. About a third of their time is being spent on investigation management, because it’s all being done in spreadsheets, and emails, and pulling stuff into Excel. And there’s no analytics and reporting. And, you know, we see about a 50% reduction when folks come onto a tool like ours. Let’s just assume a third, you know, we’re saving 33% instead of 50%. So what does that do? That turns out to be one extra head. So that means I’ll be able to get the same amount of work done with one less person. We can get that F out of the equation.
Or let’s say we can coach that F up because they’re so disengaged, because you’re doing all of this kind of paperwork. And you’re just like every other ethics and compliance professional out there that has a whole list of really important but non-urgent things that you want to get to that are going to be stepwise reductions in the risk profile of your organization. Well guess what? A tool like this is going to automatically get you that extra head or that extra headcount implicit to the organization. So, totally efficiency savings in this case of 84.5. And again, in your particular situation, this can be cut and expressed in a number of different ways. This right here, round of applause. This is where the real needle mover comes. Because this is again, as you can see, this 3.0, this area of effectiveness, we, as the circulatory system of our organization really start working and bringing the right ethical nutrients to the different organs in the body that is our company. As we can start to actualize that and breathe more life into those different parts, we start to see some really magical things happen.
So this is the underpinning of that 25% ethical premium that we saw a few slides back. This is the underpinning of the higher employee engagement that companies like WD40 enjoy, and that are right there for you to enjoy as well. Again, it’s about taking advantage, it’s about understanding that sort of secondary or tertiary impact that our efforts can have on our organization, and bringing that into the discussion. So, this is going to be boiled down into two different pieces for the 3.0 return. One is, so this is the cultural return, which is what we’re going to call it, and it’s going to be in two pieces. One is an employee turnover reduction, and one is a employee engagement improvement. Again, you can look online and see all the different things that highly engaged companies, you know, what they get to enjoy. Whether it’s, you know, bigger margins and stuff like that. You can just pick a couple of them. These are two simple ones. So again, we’re going back, and we’re taking the most conservative estimates from all those data points that we shared earlier. And so let’s start talking about the turnover rate improvement.
So we had quit rates of 26% currently, over the last year. Historically, that was only 10%. And we’re saying that it’s going to cost only a third of someone’s salary. We’re not saying it’s gonna cost nine months, we’re not saying it’s going to cost a full year or two years, like some of those other estimates. We’re saying, super conservative, we’re saying it’s only going to cost a third of someone’s salary on a fully loaded basis, to talk about the training, and the ramp up through the J-curve, and the recruiting costs, and all those kinds of things. Very conservative. And we’re saying, listen, it was 26% in the past, or it was 10%, you know, historically, it’s 26% last year. We’re not going to wave some sort of ethical magic wand and have that collapse back down over the next year to 10%. But do we think a 2% reduction is reasonable? I do. I built the case, so of course I do. But the point is, there’s $2 million of excess return right there, that’s never in our conversation in the past. Well, now let’s bring that into the conversation. So we have 2.2 here, and let’s start talking about the employee engagement. Gio, walk us through this last piece of the cultural thing, and then we’ll wrap this up.
Gio: Yeah. So, you know, we talked about employee engagement. This is a big thing, guys. Like I said, imagine that each of your employees just left for two or three hours a day and weren’t working at all. This is effectively that, but they’re at their desk, and they’re on TikTok, or they’re just not trying that hard or whatever. So if you got 5000 employees… And this is going to scale up if you got 50, or 500, or 50,000 employees. But, you know, you look at the total cost per employee, right? Like, what’s their total salary cost plus benefits and taxes and all of that. And this quit rate and this engagement rate, you just factor those in. And, you know, we can walk you through the math here, but we got to go quickly here. You know, we’re basically saying, if instead of wasting three hours a day, what if they just wasted 2 hours and 50 minutes a day? We’re just taking 10 minutes off the 3 hours that they’re wasting a day, right? The 30%, 35% of disengagement, where, again, like Nick said, we’re not just saying it all goes away, we’re just saying, hey, what if we could get a few people to be a little bit less jaded and distrusting of our organization?
Again, we got to believe that we can have this impact. This is why we’re doing this stuff. Because employees need it, because people want it. And the great thing, everybody, more than any time in the past five decades, employees care about the stuff that we’re trying to do. So it’s easier to make this claim and to make this appeal and to say, hey, the problem’s bigger than it’s ever been before. Everyone cares about it more than they ever have before. And also our compliance division, our ethics, our organization is in a better position to impact this more important thing than ever before. This is the best time in the history of the world to invest in your compliance and ethics program. And engagement is just one of the things that we can tweak a little bit in order to have a huge return.
Nick: So we’re going to break this down into two different pieces. Our efficiency and risk return on one side, and our culture are Compliance 3.0 return on the other side. So you can see these are the returns that we generated up top. That’s wrong. That’s supposed to be 360. Don’t hate us. No bad reviews because of one typo. I mean, that’s not that big of a deal. Right? Okay. So our efficiency return is 2.2 times. Just to put this in perspective, there are massive billion-dollar private equity funds out there that are trying to only get two times their return over five years. If you can point to easily identifiable efficiency returns, risk reduction returns, that again, to Jermaine’s question, that the folks you’re selling to were a part of the assumptions that went into the estimation for what that return is, we’re talking to 2.2. But the real needle mover is over here. The point is, your company’s already spending that and they don’t even know about it. The point is, the level of disengagement inside your organization, if we can get that up a little bit, that all falls to the bottom line. If we can reduce turnover, that all falls to the bottom line. And you deserve to have that as part of your discussion because it’s a factor. I mean, the data shows it, the survey show it.
If you talk to anybody in Gen Z, anybody in the millennial generation, this is what they care about. And we have the power to help create and be the arbiter of that kind of environment in our organization. So let’s say we go through this and we say, we got a 29X return. I want to spend a mere 200K to make some meaningful changes, and I’m talking about a 29X return. You guys, you board, you CFO, you, CEO, you are along the hallway with me. We made all of these assumptions together. And we, on average, kept pulling the most conservative estimates, as all the inputs to this equation. Let’s say we’re 50% wrong, we’re still talking about a 15X return. So the point is, this is super compelling. These guys and gals on the board level, in the C-suite, are obviously looking for positive ROI investments. And there’s a massive one right under their nose, but it’s going to be up to you to turn their light bulb on. Again, getting back to what Gio said on the first or second slide. It’s going to be small tweaks to our mindset, small tweaks to our top tracks, small tweaks to the way that we engage with leadership to get the things that we need.
You deserve it. It’s the right thing to do for our organization. And again, it’s right there for you to take it. So I know we ran over. As you can tell, we’re super passionate about this. I love this whole discussion because there’s so much opportunity in it. And it really helps us get that seat at the table. Listen, IT has a seat at the table now, right? Well, 20 years ago, they didn’t have a seat at the table. How did they get there? We need to follow that trail that they blazed and take advantage of what is right in front of us and play these hands that we’re dealt appropriately. So, Gio, thank you so much for joining us. Any parting words for the 100 or so folks that are still left. Guys, if you love this presentation, drop a nine in there for Gio. The big man helped us through it, turned the light bulbs on. Thank you for staying long. Thank you for staying on the EthicsVerse, the coolest place to be every Thursday, to elevate your ethics compliance and human resource acumen. Gio, take us out.
Gio: Yeah. I would just say, guys, just like we talked about, that culture is not going to change overnight, your ability to pitch your ROI is not going to change overnight. But pick up one, or two, or three things from this and make sure that you’re doing something to present a more compelling story. We all have it in our heart, we all know that our company needs this, our organization needs this, our employees need this, so that they can live in an environment at work that is worthy of the effort that they put in.
It’s high integrity, high ethics. We know that we need it. We can convey it in a more compelling way than we have. And try to pick one or two or three things from this and put them into your next presentation. And then build on that over time. You can do it, you have the skills and you have the knowledge to implement a great program. A small tweak to how you present it is going to help you get the budget, and the people, and the tools that you need to make the awesome impact that you can. I believe in you. I know that there’s some stuff in here you can pick up. And please get in touch with us if you want this explained differently or you want some help with it.
Nick: And be looking for that EthicsVerse in the subject line. Check your folders because there’s gonna be a lot of winners from today’s session. Invite your ethics and compliance friends, connect with other people in this amazing industry that we’re all a part of. And we will see you soon.
