Creating and Maintaining a Healthy Corporate Culture: RANE podcast with Azish Filabi

In this podcast, (Risk Assessment Network + Exchange) RANE’s Serina Vash sits down with Azish Filabi, Executive Director, Ethical Systems, to discuss what drives a healthy corporate culture and best practices for creating and maintaining that culture. Through research and collaboration with the best academics in the field, Azish dedicates her time to helping businesses assess and promote ethical behavior and culture in their organizations.

Selected quotes from Azish from the interview:

“We started the culture measurement working group- headed by Linda Trevino– initially because … the regulators in banking and financial services were focused on the role of culture. There were a lot of questions about what do you mean by culture and questions about if you can actually measure it. Our collaborators believe you can and they have validated measures within academia that they have been using in various contexts. We brought together the leading researchers who have been studying the informal and formal systems in organizations from a culture perspective. The culture framework that we created…will help the industry understand better what we mean by culture.”

“Culture is a complex and multi-system framework that must be aligned to encourage ethical behavior.”

“A big-picture perspective: the key findings relate to [the belief] that you can really measure culture. And there are ways to know whether you are working in or leading, an ethical culture. It is not as nebulous as some people fear that it might be. And there are ways to address how to measure them. There are certain best practices to measuring culture. Having an external party do culture assessments is likely to lead to more honest responses. Having that extra barrier is protective for employees. It is important to work with measures that have been developed in scientifically valid ways, and that they have been validated with outcomes that organizations actually care about.”

“It is important to think of your outcomes and the goals of your culture measurement process and to choose the right survey methodology and measurement tools to facilitate that.”

“Having been an ethics officer myself, so many of the ethics issues one deals with are HR issues. They are about people management. They are intertwined with the business side of what is going on in an organization.”

“It is important to have senior leaders understanding the research and the long term impact of not dealing with the issues that are going on. …We want to give the ethics communities additional tools to advocate for what they see as the right thing to do in an organization.”

“Ethical awareness is really important. Just the idea of talking about ethics, and making it more salient, is how I would think about it from a social psychology perspective. But it is also about thinking about opportunities to speak up and doing so in a way that feels safe for employees so they do so before misbehavior happens.”

Further Reading: