Vault Platform Blog
Choosing to challenge inequality in STEM
-For International Women’s Day 2021, we spoke to Dee Olomajeye, Head of People at Senti Bio, a San Francisco-based technology-driven therapeutics company focused on the next generation of medicine. Senti Bio recently launched Vault Platform to ensure its employees have a safe space to speak up about all forms of workplace misconduct such as discrimination and any kind of unethical behavior.
The urgency around ethics and compliance effectiveness
-Organizations with a presence in the US are being urged to get their compliance house in order in anticipation of a crackdown on corporate ethics and compliance violations by the Biden Administration.
Whistleblowers are a golden opportunity
-“Whistleblowers are likely to be loyal employees, passionate about high standards, who go outside their organisation as a last resort when nobody takes them seriously. They aren’t defiant troublemakers; they’re disappointed believers.”
ECI report identifies key ethics challenges in remote work environments
-The Working Group survey responses also indicate that two areas highly impacted by a shift to remote working are lowered employee engagement due to competing work-life priorities (16%) and decreased transparency of remote activities (11%), both of which can impact an organization’s speak up culture.
High flying public companies at greater risk of fraud
-Researchers found that companies with Fortune 500 status were represented nearly four times as often among the firms that had committed fraud. Furthermore, firms that traded on NYSE were over-represented by nearly two to one in terms of fraudulent activity, versus those that trade on other exchanges like the NASDAQ or OTC.
Business ethics is the biggest risk business face today
-Over the course of the last 12 months, business ethics has shifted from being a sizable but somewhat intangible risk…
Misconduct reports to external bodies hit record high
-The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) had a bumper year in terms of payouts. The EEOC secured a record amount of recovery, more than $535m, for victims of discrimination in the workplace.
A culture of respect needs the right tools as well as the right tone
-This week saw the swearing-in of US President Joe Biden, who set a strong tone for inclusion and respect when he warned that any political appointee showing disrespect would be fired on the spot. Conduct is set out by your policies and codes and sets the framework and the boundaries for how your people are expected to behave in the workplace. But conduct doesn’t guarantee behavior – this is where culture comes in.
Financial authority warns of misconduct risk among homeworkers
-The UK’s financial watchdog this week warned that it is seeing an increased risk of financial misconduct among homeworkers due to a lack of oversight and controls over communication tools.
Big Tech faces more employee activism over misconduct handling
-The Alphabet Workers Union aims to pressure the company to prioritize ethics in product development, and take reports of workplace misconduct, including diversity, pay discrimination, and sexual harassment, more seriously.
