In 2020, leading Saudi company stc, a Riyadh, Saudi Arabia-based provider of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and digital services, embarked on a journey to elevate its culture of integrity with the launch of its new ethics and compliance program. In this three-part series, we look back over the last two years to take stock of how stc accomplished those goals. Click here to read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.
The CEC team partners with the Corporate Communications team to develop strategic content plans that clearly communicate the ethical expectations the Company has of its employees, business partners, and other stakeholders. In particular, these campaigns create and increase awareness around the stc Code of Ethics, complying with applicable laws, raising integrity concerns, and stc’s commitment to non-retaliation.
Every year stc’s CEO sends a message to all employees reminding them about the importance stc places in doing things the right way and the responsibilities employees have in elevating the Company’s culture of Integrity. Each quarter, the CEO’s direct reports send an integrity-themed message to employees within their organization. And every month, awareness messages about the risk areas in the Code of Ethics are communicated to employees in the form of email messages, infographics, or visual digital posters in the stc internal magazine or the employee intranet.
In addition, the CEC team will provide communication toolkits for people managers in 2022 to facilitate discussion around integrity topics during team meetings.
Compliance Reviews and Councils
Beginning October 2021, the CEC team has been conducting Compliance reviews across the Company.
These reviews involve face-to-face sessions with individual General Managers and their teams—as well as separate sessions with each of the Organization Chiefs and their GMs—to understand and identify compliance risks that are present within each organization.
To increase engagement, the CEC team initially conducted these reviews as facilitated sessions. This gives participants the opportunity to engage and ask questions and enabled the CEC team to build relationships with employees and leaders across the business. There is always an effort to shift employee perception of compliance from being about following the rules to upholding a culture of integrity.
Compliance Reviews will be an ongoing activity for stc and reviews will be conducted periodically for all organizations across the business.
Meanwhile, the CEC team is establishing Compliance Councils across stc. These councils consist of each Organization’s Chief, their direct reports, representatives from allied departments (e.g., Human Resources) and members of the CEC team. The councils meet on a quarterly basis and give the Chiefs and leaders direct visibility about their organizations in terms of compliance investigations, training, communications and other compliance program elements in their sector. This will help leaders to drive engagement around ethics and compliance and thereby impact the integrity culture.
Conclusion
Although the stc Ethics and Compliance program launched amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the program has added value internally and externally.
Internally, based on internal employee survey results, more employees know about the importance of having and abiding by a Code of Ethics and about reporting integrity concerns. Employees have given positive feedback and rated the Integrity training highly.
Externally, the Program has helped stc in increasing scores with rating agencies and benchmarks. In particular, stc’s improved year-over-year score in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI) can be attributed directly to the ethics and compliance program.
stc’s ethics and compliance journey has only just begun, but with the vision and guidance of our leadership, the active cooperation from employees, and the efforts of the CEC team, the company hopes to set an example of ethical leadership for others in the region to follow.
