Is it possible to be compliant if it’s not part of the organizational culture? We write policies and tick the boxes, but at the end of the day it’s really the culture that defines if we’re compliant and ethical. Culture determines what is acceptable and valued no matter what is written in the policies. We welcomed Niina Ratsula to discuss about doing the right thing.

Many people may find the concept of “culture” a bit difficult to understand and explain, especially in the working life. For us humans it is quite challenging to become aware of our own behavioral patterns, yet realize we’re being part of and contributing to a “culture”. However, culture is the key component of corporations and it will eat your strategy for breakfast if you’re not making sure that the desired behavior happens outside the policies and even when no one is watching.

Culture starts with people and should be everybody’s business in the organizations. It is not enough if the values only reflect the management, they should represent the entire organization and all its people. Most of the times it is easy to recognize what is right and what is wrong, but the our working culture might not encourage us to actually speak up about the wrong doings. How can we encourage people to speak freely and without a fear? How to break the awkward silence?

In addition to compliance culture, we talk about work ethics. Traditionally, we have overlooked some topics in the legal industry. However, these are the days that also law firms have to start paying attention to their own culture. Is it ethical to expect people to burn the midnight oil? Should we match people with the excisting culture or should we match the culture with people? Tune into this episode to learn more about designing and re-designing the organizational culture!

Niina Ratsula is an ethics, compliance and governance professional, with a strong focus on corporate cultures and internal control. Niina is known for “translating codes of conduct from paper into daily actions and decision making”.

Niina spent 12 years in multinational corporations (Nokia and Kemira) focusing on ethics, compliance, internal controls and audit. In 2018 she started her own business Code of Conduct Company and is now supporting organizations in building their ethics and compliance programs, ethical leadership and internal control projects. Niina was awarded the recognition as the ‘responsible business influencer’ in Finland in 2019.

Niina is also an author and has written several books in Finnish on the topics of Internal Control, Internal Audit and Ethical Leadership. She defended her PhD. in 2020 with a topic “Interplay between technical and social control – Case study of Nokia’s SOX implementation project”.