The US Post Office has been in financial trouble for years.
As a governmental entity, it has reacted to those difficulties like most commercial enterprises: cut staff, and ask everyone to do more with less.
Fewer mail carriers means longer days. Longer days means overtime. Overtime means larger deficits. How do you curb overtime? Give pay raises only to supervisors who keep overtime low.
And so, for years now, there has been a well-known, and well-documented practice of supervisors not paying their mail carriers’ overtime. Should we be shocked? Hardly. This outcome was predictable.
The real culprits are those executives who created financial incentives to eliminate overtime. And they are getting off the hook. Instead, supervisors have been forced to lie, and front-line carriers are being cheated.
Make a list of your financial incentives. Then make a list of your ethical and compliance issues. Put the two side-by-side. Can you draw lines from one list to the other?
Writing as “The Ethical Leader,” Yan Tougas draws on 15 years of experience as a compliance & ethics officer at a Fortune 500 company, sharing insights, wisdom and lessons learned. This post originally appeared on “The Ethical Leader” and is reprinted here with permission. Views expressed are that of the author. Visit him at YanTougas.com, connect with him on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.
Yan Tougas, Global Ethics & Compliance Officer, Raytheon Technologies Corporation
Yan Tougas oversees Raytheon’s global ethics programs, supporting a network of nearly 300 Ethics & Compliance Officers, managing the company’s Ombuds program, and ensuring that best practices are adopted across Raytheon’s business units. Ethical culture and leadership is the focus of all activities under his responsibility.
Yan joined Raytheon in 2000 and held positions of increasing responsibility at several of its business units. He took his current position at the Corporate Office in 2012.
Yan holds a LL.B from the University of Sherbrooke School of Law (Quebec) and a LL.M. from University of Connecticut School of Law. He sits on the Board of the Ethics & Compliance Initiative and on the Advisory Board of the Hoffman Center for Business Ethics at Bentley University. Yan currently lives in Connecticut with his wife and three children. 
