How Voya Financial takes a fresh approach on ethics

In 2017, Voya Financial released a video featuring staffers from its communications team offering lessons to colleagues on staying on the right side of gifts and entertainments rules. In a twist, their performances were based on the TV comedy The Office, adding some welcome levity.

The video was released as part of Voya’s annual ethics awareness week, which is intended to encourage employees to ‘do the right thing’ by educating them about the firm’s compliance and ethics program. It is a typically innovative effort by the firm and, along with the level of commitment that setting aside a whole week shows, illustrates why Voya is the winner of this year’s award for best compliance and ethics program (small to mid-cap).

William Welch, chief compliance and ethics officer at Voya, tells Corporate Secretary that his team strives to make compliance training increasingly interesting to engage employees. Tools such as the video are designed to be impactful and easy to understand and retain.

Over the awards review period, the team updated the firm’s code of conduct with a similar philosophy in mind. According to Welch, the focus was to use real-world situations so that employees are ready to deal with them when they arise. To develop these, the team examined the questions its members have been asked by colleagues in the rest of the business and picked ones that spoke to important and common issues.

As part of the team’s intelligent approach, Welch emphasizes that ‘people understand compliance better when they understand the why’. If employees don’t understand the underlying purpose of a rule and its context, they will be less able to understand how to deal with new situations, he adds.

In addition, the team has made Voya’s ethics helpline more interactive. When callers leave a complaint or report, they are now assigned a reference number that is forwarded to Welch’s team. In the past, a caller might not leave enough information in his or her message for the team to be able to follow up effectively, and due to the anonymous nature of the helpline, he or she could not be reached for further details, either.

With the improved system, the compliance and ethics team can now request extra details via the reference number – such as whether there are other witnesses to whatever is being reported – while protecting callers’ anonymity and assuring them that they do not have to respond if they don’t wish to.

Another particular focus over the review period has been privacy and fraud, Welch says. Given the climate of concern over cyber-security, much time and effort has been devoted over the past year to developing systems and controls to protect both Voya and its customers. For example, an internal team of certified ethical hackers takes part in global ‘capture the flag’ competitions.

This article originally appeared in the Winter issue of Corporate Secretary.