Navigating the Future of E&C and the Intersection of E&C and Social Justice Issues

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This year’s ECI IMPACT conference was shaped by current events, from COVID-19 to systemic racism and hate crimes, and included valuable insights from experts in social justice, the future of healthcare, and ethics & compliance (E&C). There were 23 sessions in total – 5 keynotes, 16 educational sessions, 2 High-Quality Performance Assessment Brown Bag roundtables, and benchmarking discussions – over three days.

It would be impossible to share all that was available to IMPACT attendees in one blog post, so we will be posting more in the coming weeks. We encourage those who attended to take advantage of the recordings that will remain available online through September 2021.

In this post, we look back at Day 1 keynotes, which featured Jamie Metzl, a technology and healthcare futurist and global affairs specialist. On the morning of April 20. Metzl reminded attendees that organizations don’t have values built in, so E&C professionals play a vital role in infusing “our best values into our technology, organizations and systems, and institutions” so we don’t wind up in “some strange future in which we feel alienated from who we are and what we stand for.”

Establishing and maintaining E&C is complicated, particularly because today’s accelerating rate of change and knowledge sharing can make it difficult to predict the future. Metzl said that having a vision of where you are today and a plan for building cultures, structures, and systems to support that vision going forward will make it easier to do the “best and right thing when you get there.”

The Day 1 afternoon keynote session featured remarks on the intersection of social justice and E&C from Debo P. Adegbile, Commissioner on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and Sandra Evers-Manly, Vice President of Global Corporate Responsibility at Northrop Grumman.

Adegbile shaped his remarks around changes in American society that have pushed companies to think and act differently about social justice issues. As he explained, companies are experiencing both E&C opportunities and risks internally and externally. Today’s workforce expects more from their organizations in terms of how they respond to current events and social issues. Both employees and consumers want to know that companies are ethical. And younger employees require their employers to be ethical, expect them to take a position on issues, and require them to “walk the talk” in terms of the values they espouse.
He also said that there has been a shift in expectations for companies to enter the fray of political processes, such as voting rights. Again, both employees and consumers expect companies to step up and take a stand rather than stand by and watch events unfold.

Adegbile and Evers-Manly went on to discuss how social media can be used to pressure companies to do the right thing. Visual images of injustice have made more people understand the real inequities that are visited upon certain communities. That understanding also has prompted employees and consumers to push for companies to share where they stand on societal injustices and to make changes to policies to address discriminatory or inequities in the workplace.

We were honored to have many other leading E&C professionals lead or participate in our educational sessions throughout the conference. Experts from the Nestle Group, Novartis, Emagence LLC, the Integrity Coordinator, the Center for Audit Quality, Crowe and Deloitte & Touche, Lockheed Martin, Affiliated Monitors, Lumen Worldwide Endeavors, NAVEX Global and Cox Corporate Services presented on Day 1. The topics they discussed ranged from how E&C investigations must evolve, the new EU Whistleblowing Directive and managing incidents in a post-COVID world, among others.

IMPACT attendees, watch your favorite session again or one you might have missed by going to the #IMPACT21 website if you didn’t attend IMPACT, you can purchase On-Demand access to any of the IMPACT sessions now.

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