3M’s Transparency Journey: Using Ethics and Compliance Cases as Teaching Tools

In SCCE’s Complete Compliance and Ethics Manual (CCEM), one of the first chapter titles that caught my eye was on 3M’s use of actual cases as teaching tools.  This chapter, by Michael A. Duran and John M. Stoxen, dove into a communications approach that some view as controversial, but I have seen to be enormously effective.

3M has found that the use of stories based on actual internal case examples is a startlingly effective tool to get employees’ attention. As the authors wrote in the chapter, once they started using these actual cases, “[e]mployees emphatically asked for more real-life examples.”  

Keep problems secret? 

At 3M they had previously followed the instinctive advice of the internal voices not to publicize problems or failures.  In fact, the CCEM chapter helpfully lists what the pushbacks are likely to be for any suggestion to publicize disciplinary cases.  But then the company had a serious and expensive case of internal fraud, and realized how unengaged employees had been in the circumstances.  The company’s people just did not believe this type of thing could happen there, and also did not see themselves as responsible for taking steps to prevent or stop misconduct. 

In most organizations the instinctive response is not to publicize bad news or tell everyone about it. You may think something is confidential just because you didn’t officially mention it, but it is not.  Maybe the real story is confidential, but the parallel story created by employees’ imaginations is very much alive.  So there is likely already a story about what happened, circulating around the company.  If the company does not have a believable story to tell, others will fill in the vacant space. Thus keeping quiet about a compliance incident may not even have the value that was intended.    

Stories work & DOJ knows this

What 3M realized was that stories are a great way for people to learn. Stories are much more memorable than lectures, manuals and instructions. The authors also noted that DOJ, in its evaluation questions, mentions learning from experience as one communications technique, which would clearly include this approach. For example, the Criminal Division in its evaluation questions asks “What communications have there been generally when an employee is terminated or otherwise disciplined for failure to comply with the company’s policies, procedures and controls (e.g., anonymized descriptions of the type of misconduct that leads to discipline.)?” The Division also indicates its skepticism for excuses for not doing this, referring to “pre-textual reasons . . .to protect the company from whistleblowing or outside scrutiny.”  It praises the “valuable deterrent effects” from “publicized disciplinary actions internally”  (US Department of Justice, Criminal Division, Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs (Updated March 2023) pp. 5, 13, 12). It is evident that the government recognizes the power of this technique.  

The recounting of what happened in this fraud case in 3M helped get the message to employees to be alert to and aware of signs of misconduct in the business. In this fraud case there had been warning signs but employees didn’t think that could happen here.  Also, employees believed the company didn’t care and did nothing, because it never said anything about the cases. 

Learning from experience

The company learned from this experience and decided to do a worldwide training program based on facts of this case and others.  This approach riveted the audiences. They even saw the actual documents from cases. Of course, in all the training and communication personally identifiable information was removed to protect the privacy of individuals.   

3M is a global company with over 90,000 employees and a chief ethics and compliance officer that reports to the board’s audit committee.  From this experience they have learned to post case studies about good and bad decisions made in the company. They do leadership development training using real problems the company has faced.  They also provide high-level investigation data to all employees which helps to demystify the investigation process and addresses concerns employees may have about organizational justice. 

Other companies & examples

One reason I was so pleased to see this chapter was that I had had personal experience with the success of this approach.  In Bell Atlantic we published a quarterly “Report on Integrity”  which was a collection of actual case stories, apparently along the same lines as 3M.  In planning the newsletter I had cautioned my colleagues not to have a preaching publication, nor one that gives lawyerly explanations of the law.  We knew that people related to stories.  We found in surveys and in personal interactions with employees that this report on compliance case stories was the most popular method for getting the message to employees. We published an article about this program in 1998, Joseph E. Murphy & Douglass J. McCollum, “Communicating ‘In a Practical matter:’ Bell Atlantic’s Report on Integrity,”6  Corporate Conduct Quarterly 59 (1998). Similarly, in SCCE’s early days, it gave one of its prestigious awards to DuPont and Marjorie Doyle for publication of compliance stories.  From time to time I have heard of others using this came attention-getting approach.

Getting practical ideas

Generally, when I read compliance books and other materials I relate more to specific, practical ideas than I do to general theories on how to approach this area.  Chapters like this one fit that interest perfectly.  You can read a chapter in the CCEM and immediately find an idea you can apply today in your compliance and ethics program. Perhaps you could start with this exact chapter and make the move to power up your communications strategy so that you can reach your employees in a memorable and impactful way.