A letter from our CEO

To our customers and the global Ethics and Compliance community,

We are closely watching the evolving coronavirus news, and are considering the impact on our customers, our communities, our employees and families. Organizations that don’t communicate proactively with their employees are experiencing greater unease. We highly recommend that you work with your teams to send a coordinated and clear communication to all employees. Ethics and compliance teams are uniquely positioned to mitigate increased risk within their organizations, especially as it pertains to appropriate response to fears, harassment and bullying, and the degree to which the organization can request disclosure of personal or family illness.

We want to immediately share three things while we continue to develop our response:

• We are committed to maintaining your access to Convercent: Our existing Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is designed for global resiliency, and we will maintain service continuity for you during this critical time. It’s more important than ever that you be the critical resource for your employees. We will provide a briefing document for you to share internally with your teams to answer questions and provide transparency around our BCP.
• Convercent has implemented and maintains a business continuity plan designed to ensure our ability to meet ongoing responsibilities to our customers. The plan is validated and revised no less than annually to ensure we can meet all operational requirements of the business continuity plan. This plan is inclusive of pandemics, in that each of Convercent’s departments have formally verified remote working, duplication of knowledge, and access necessary to business tools ensuring continuous service. We are monitoring the situation very closely, not only for our own internal business but also with our business partners.
• Global Telephony: At this time, there have not been any recently detected issues with our hotline numbers. However, we are monitoring the situation closely, and already proactively test our hotline numbers on a frequent basis. COVID-19 may impact telecommunications in certain areas. Affected communities are restricting movement significantly, and many businesses are altering work patterns, imposing travel freezes, and moving to home-office arrangements. The demand pattern on local and national telecoms networks has changed drastically, causing strain and impacting international telecommunication services as well. In the event that audio quality and connectivity issues occur, it may take the local telecommunications carriers longer to resolve issues due to the altering of work patterns and travel freezes.

We remain committed to communicate promptly any issues that affect our services, and partnering with you as you engage with your employees and proactively respond to this crisis. For those of you with access to these Convercent applications, we suggest the following actions to help manage and mitigate the risk:

• Campaigns/Policies: Do you have new or updated policies or procedures to share with your workforce? Should they work from home, or do they need to get travel preapproved by a certain department? Update your policies and send an update to your employees.
• Ethics & Compliance Portal: Health and safety is a key component of all our ethics & compliance programs. Update your portal and use it as a vehicle to communicate with your employees on the steps being taken to address the coronavirus and link to any key company resources.
• Awareness: Proactively communicate the heightened risk of bullying and harassment, as employees react with fear to individuals who have flu-like symptoms or have recently returned from high-risk areas. Ensure employees know how to legally and effectively assess the level of risk and act appropriately.
• Helpline: Direct employees to your helpline to record their concerns or observations about the Coronavirus. That is what Helpline is intended to do—help you understand and navigate keys risks across the organization. Receiving and addressing these concerns via your helpline allows Insights to help you analyze and predict risks and vulnerabilities related to the virus.
• Disclosures: With your disclosures process, you can create an optional declaration of illness or absence that can be routed to a specific person or department for consideration. Just like the COI declarations, you can create a central repository for coronavirus declarations.

In the coming days, we will share additional information on resources and support we can offer through our services and our community. We will also host a webinar next week to expand on these thoughts.

Sincerely,

Patrick Quinlan,
CEO, Convercent