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Conduct regulators continued to expand their powers and reporting expectations during 2021 and into 2022. Now regulators 'culture assessment' of firms includes interviews with regulatees' front office staff. Any member of your staff may be asked about what they understand is the everyday workplace meaning of terms such as 'socially purposeful business', 'psychological safety', 'consumer duty', 'safe speak-up', 'inclusive', or 'doing right'. Moving beyond their earlier focus on Senior Manager roles, regulators now listen for 'messages from the engine room', asking staff about how their employer's claimed corporate values play out in practice, and any instances of abusive behaviour ('non-financial misconduct') of any kind. Pre-learned answers will not be acceptable.  

In reality this means your firm's staff now need to be able to discuss, in plain language without compliance jargon, what the Conduct agenda means at a personal level in their own work. How do they recognise 'exemplary conduct' in customer service? How they routinely care for even the most vulnerable customers? Show a culture of responsible risk-taking? Are confident to call out any misconduct they see?

Though managing conduct never meant simply 'doing Conduct Risk Compliance', various regulators' culture assessments have now brought a new level of ethical scrutiny. Firms need to prepare all staff to join a firm-wide conversation about Conduct - looking beyond the formal Six Conduct Questions, to show an alert awareness of where financial and non-financial misconduct may arise and how to challenge them when they do.      

Attendees at this highly interactive workshop will discover, discuss and practice putting vital elements of ethically 'acceptable and expected behaviour' into action. On completing this session, you will be better equipped to keep your firm ahead of the Conduct regulator's concerns over financial and non-financial misconduct, ensuring that your firm welcomes constructive challenge, thinks diversely and rejects abusive behaviour in any form.

Learning outcomes:

• The key factors your firm needs to demonstrate at work in practice, to support its claims to an ethical culture 
• How the regulator uses behavioural science-based tests to assess the ethical quality of your firm's products and marketing propositions
• Understand what 'social licence' and customer-centric working mean in practice: impacts of pandemic and other vox populi risks; examples such as regulator actions against 'greenwashing'
• Managing ethical challenges: responding to real-life experience examples where the 'right answer' is not obvious
• Checking the state of your firm's 'anti-bystanding' initiatives to prevent non-financial misconduct: methods of rating and reporting behaviours that the regulator will monitor (such as speaking up, anti-harrassment, inclusion, cognitive diversity and leadership quality) 
• Identify, anticipate and manage the grey areas of Conduct risk, where the formal rules fail to provide clear ethical guidance
• What is meant in practice by 'psychological safety': How to build a continuously learning organisation where constructive challenge is welcomed, where business gains value from a culture of constructive challenge as staff are confident to raise thoughtful questions and co-operate in solving problems
• Know in plain terms what the Six Conduct Questions really require staff to do in their daily work
• Improve business resilience and ethical engagement, by harnessing your firm's greatest overlooked asset