FRC Culture Conference - Session 4: Embedding and measuring organisational culture
News types: Codes and Standards Announcements, Generic Announcement, Policies and Responsibilities, Policy Statements
Published: 20 May 2021
The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) will be hosting an international conference in June entitled Audit Firm Culture: Challenge. Trust. Transformation to explore the link between audit firm culture and audit quality with the objective of accelerating the pace of change for cultural transformation in the audit profession. The conference will consist of five lunchtime webinars (Monday 21 June – Friday 25 June) with a range of leading speakers and panellists.
The fourth session, Embedding and measuring organisational culture , will take place on Thursday 24 June 2021 13:00 to 14:15 (BST).
This session considers the different approaches that audit firms can apply to assessing their audit firm culture. It will be moderated by Claire Lindridge, Director of Audit Market Supervision at the FRC. The speakers in this session are:
Dr Roger Miles, Behaviour at Risk (BaR) insight; Oxford Scholar, PhD, FRSA
Dr Roger Miles researches human-factor risks among regulated financial providers worldwide, helping steer their responses to new Conduct regulations, Culture Audits and capital charges against Reputation Risk. He convenes knowledge sharing groups of senior executives including forums at UK Finance, whose Conduct and Culture Academy he co-founded in 2017. Following audit practice with PwC he advised the Boards of large publicly listed companies in the UK, EU and US as a partner in investor relations firm Georgeson & Co. He was Director of Communications and Enterprises for the BBA (under Sir Brian Pitman), UK corporate affairs lead at FBE in Brussels, and later a Head of Risk Communications in HM Civil Service, before giving all that up to requalify as a risk psychologist and university lecturer. With research among more than 400 firms participating in UK Finance Conduct sessions since 2016, he has amassed a unique exemplar body of conduct programmes, reporting designs, indicators and definitions. His research uses language analytics and specialist ‘sensitive topic research’ techniques to identify previously unvoiced concerns. These findings guide the design of the firm’s framework of human-factor risk indicators and reports, encouraging the start of productive “conduct conversations” at all levels, embedding spontaneous best practice in risk reporting. His published work includes the financial sector’s popular handbook Conduct Risk Management: A behavioural approach (2017) and Culture Audit: Reporting on behaviour to conduct regulators (2021), which includes chapters co-authored with senior regulators in the UK, EU, US and APAC. He co-edits the Encyclopaedia of Key Psychology Concepts for the London School of Economics annual Behavioral Economics Guides and is a contributing editor at Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence. In 2006-7, he analysed how banks were ‘gaming’ their public reporting on regulatory capital, whose theory was validated abruptly when global financial markets crashed in 2008. In 2010 he accurately predicted the change of financial regime to ‘behaviour-based regulation’; the UK’s Conduct regime launched in 2013 and included core principles he had earlier identified.
Dr Tom Reader, London School of Economics
Dr Tom Reader is an Associate Professor of Organisational Psychology at the London School of Economics. He directs the MSc in Organisational and Social Psychology, leads an MSc and Executive course on Organisational Culture, and is a chartered psychologist (MA and PhD, University of Aberdeen; Leverhulme Fellowship). Tom’s research focuses on organisational and safety culture: he studies how norms and behaviours relating to risk-management, team-working, and ethical conduct emerge in organizations and contribute to outcomes (e.g., safety, decision-making). Tom’s current work investigates how organizations can better detect and respond to signals of impeding and serious failure. Specifically, he explores how stakeholders who may lack institutional power (e.g., junior employees, service users) can have insights on critical problems at the operational-level of work (e.g., errors, accidents, conduct) that are unseen or unaddressed by senior decision-makers. Tom examines the psychological and organizational mechanisms (e.g., culture, data analytics) through which such insights can be given prominence, and thereby learnt from and used to support organizational resilience.
Professor Celia Moore, Imperial College London
Celia Moore is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Imperial College Business School. Prior to joining Imperial, she held positions at Bocconi University in Milan and London Business School. She has also been a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School and a Fellow of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She is currently an Academic Fellow of the Ethics and Compliance Initiative and sits on the UK’s Banking Standards Board Assessment Steering Committee. Her teaching sits at the intersection of leadership and ethics. She is particularly interested in supporting individuals to enact their moral agency responsibly. She has worked with several organizations on how to support more ethical behaviour at work, including the Financial Conduct Authority (UK), the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales (London, UK), the National Health Service (UK), the Brookings Institute (Washington, DC), and several major financial institutions. Her research focuses on how organizations unintentionally facilitate morally problematic behaviour, and on how to resist these consequences, which has been published in various renowned academic journals. Her work has been featured in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fast Company, as well as on NPR, the CBC, and the BBC.
Rick Borges, Director of Assessment (UK and International), Banking Standards Board
Rick Borges is the Director, Assessment (UK and International) at the Banking Standards Board and member of its Executive Committee. He has senior responsibility for the BSB Assessment of culture, behaviour and competence across member banks and building societies and other firms outside membership in the UK and abroad. Rick previously worked at the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care where he was responsible for a programme to improve standards of behaviour and competence of healthcare practitioners. He also acted as an advisor on professional standards and regulation to other organisations, including the Press Recognition Panel (set up following the Leveson Inquiry), the Department for Education, the Government of Ontario (Canada) and the administration of Hong Kong. He started his career at the Department of Health, in the Private Office of a Minister of State, then worked for the National Information Governance Board for Health and Social Care, and in the Private Office of the Director General for NHS Informatics. Rick is a trustee of National Voices, a charity in England, where he is also the Treasurer and the Chair of the Audit and Risk Committee. He has a master’s in law (LLM) and a postgraduate diploma in law in the UK.