Companies need to find ways to make sure all employees from managers to entry-level workers are being treated equally, which becomes a challenge when companies have operations in several different countries, according to a panel of in-house lawyers at the 2019 Global Ethics Summit in New York on Thursday.

The panel on organizational justice at multinational companies was moderated by Erica Salmon Byrne, executive vice president, governance and compliance and executive director of Business Ethics Leadership Alliance at Ethisphere. The panel was made up of Joseph Moan, chief ethics and compliance officer and associate general counsel at The Coca-Cola Co.; Patrick Rowe, deputy general counsel at Accenture; Inderpreet Sawhney, group general counsel and chief compliance officer at Infosys; and Richard Buchband, senior vice president and chief legal officer at ManpowerGroup.

Byrne said most employees will take an issue to their manager. She then queried the panel on how the lawyers handle local managers reporting issues to them.

At The Coca-Cola Co., Moan said there is a global ethics and compliance committee. Three members of the committee are business unit presidents, and those positions rotate.

“Those positions rotate so we can have the business unit from our Middle East/North African division and from our south Latin division,” Moan explained. “They're making the decisions so they understand the process.”

He also explained that in each country the company has legal ethics officers. The job is usually given to the most senior lawyer in a business unit or a territory.

“This gives me 85 individuals who report to me for matters of ethics and compliance,” Moan explained.

He said that role is considered developmental assignment rather than just an extra duty they have to do.

Buchband explained one of the tools his company has rolled out is the ability to allow the managers to access reports online rather than hearing it secondhand from a company hotline where employees report problems.

“Do I have evidence that says all of the managers know how to use that? That doesn't exist. But, I'm hoping, with the passage of time and a better job from the team, that we make that awareness better known,” Buchband said.

At Infosys, Sawhney said the human resources department is much more involved and a lot of training is involved. She also said there is a hotline to report for reporting issues.

“We have in-country lawyers working closely with managers and they become another source,” Sawhney said. “Other than education, we don't have a formal way of recording.”

The same goes for Accenture, Rowe said.

“You just have to keep at it. It is about setting a global standard and just getting the country managers to keep at it,” Rowe said.

One of the challenges in organizational justice for multinational companies is there are parts of the world where getting employees to speak up about issues is a challenge.

“We do business in a lot of places where this would go against the grain for someone to report their boss or their boss' boss,” Buchband said.

Rowe said he doesn't like to generalize, adding employees in India are very willing to raise their hand to report an issue. Meanwhile, in China, employees would rather leave the job than report a superior.