For those of you who aren’t aware, which I’m sure is nearly everyone, this first week of November is Corporate Compliance & Ethics Week. It was started in 2005 as a global initiative to help spread awareness for the importance of compliance and ethics across organizations.

In celebration of Compliance Week here at RPM, I began thinking about how I personally define “compliance” and what it means to RPM. Is it simply a set of policies and rules to follow, established to ensure compliance with applicable law, or does it hold a deeper meaning?

This curiosity led me to conduct an informal survey with the aim to better understand how my colleagues around RPM think about compliance. Most of the answers I received from this survey focused on compliance as an additional or separate set of policies and requirements that aren’t always aligned with a defined business purpose—which comes as no surprise.

Although the compliance function does establish policies and rules that are designed to protect RPM companies, these policies are not what compliance is really about at its core. When compliance is operationalized within a business, it is not something “separate” or “distinct” from operations—it truly becomes a way of thinking, even an attitude.

Through our work each day, we must “do the right things, the right way, for the right reasons.” That philosophy is the essence of our Values and Expectations of 168—and what I aspire to for RPM as it relates to compliance.

So, where do we go from here? And how do we transition from viewing compliance as an additional “burden,” to embracing it as an “attitude?” As I write this letter, we are planning a journey down “Route 168”—a compliance road trip, so to speak—in a concerted effort to re-imagine how we approach compliance as we seek to better operationalize compliance across our organization and to further foster a culture rooted in The Value of 168.

Over the coming weeks, keep an eye out for emails from complianceawareness@rpminc.com with Route 168 posters and other resources as we all make our way down Route 168 together.

We encourage all of our associates to learn more about RPM’s Values and Expectations of 168 and our other corporate policies by visiting rpmpolicies.rpminc.com/rpm-policies.

If you have any questions or concerns related to compliance, you can contact RPM’s compliance team directly at compliance@rpminc.com.

As always, thank you for all that you do to help bring The Value of 168 to life at RPM.

Sincerely,

Tracy Crandall
Vice President, Associate General Counsel & Assistant Secretary