Penny Milner-Smyth

Welcome to the Great Women in Compliance Podcast, co-hosted by Lisa Fine and Mary Shirley. In episode 55 we highlight some of the hottest areas in Compliance right now – behavioral and cognitive science. At its core, Compliance is really about shaping behaviors so it is no surprise why Compliance Officers are taking an increasing interest in behavioral economics and how we can use it to better understand our key stakeholders and use the information as tools to help shape the culture of integrity in our companies. The Great Women in Compliance team loves to talk about the issues of the day so we took the opportunity to invite Penny Milner-Smyth, who has a psychology educational background and now uses research to help Compliance teams succeed, to be on the show.

Penny speaks with Mary Shirley about how we as Compliance Officers can foster psychological safety in the workplace and use that to encourage deployment of your reporting hotline. It’s critical aspiration for companies to reach – Google researchers identified psychological safety as the number one factor of importance in successful teams.

In Compliance, particularly during investigations, we often come across employees who are described as bad actors. Penny gives us the lowdown on whether people are ever easily compartmentalized into the categories of good and bad and helps us to identify factors that tend to “push” good people to do bad things.

Penny’s insights and practical advice from an organizational psychology perspective, including how you can get increased ethical behavior from your workforce just by being conscious of where on employee forms you place certain wording, is not to be missed!

See Mary’s article Why You Should Draft a Compliance Mission Statement, on Corporate Compliance Insights.

Join the Great Women in Compliance community on LinkedIn here.