As you’ll have seen in Pete Anderson’s message, we’ve created an Ethics & Compliance (E&C) Department in each Carnival operating company, with responsibility for supporting the brands to live up to the commitments made in our Corporate Vision Statement.
I’m Jane Cripps, the Ethics & Compliance Officer at Carnival UK. I’m supported by Martyn Knight, Deputy Ethics & Compliance Officer and Kathryn Bishop, Manager General Compliance. (Our photos in that order!)
We all feel a great sense of privilege and excitement to be supporting Carnival UK to do the right things, in the right ways, for the right reasons – with the help of each and every one of you. All of us has a role to play in supporting the E&C Programme whether we work ship or shore and no matter what our role. Please watch out for more information in coming weeks and months about on how you can get involved in the Carnival UK Ambassador Programme and put yourself at the centre of the action!
So, what do the Culture Essentials mean to us?
As an Ethics & Compliance Department, we’ve been reflecting on what the Culture Essentials mean to us – we’ve shared some of our thoughts below. Over the course of the next few months, we’d love to hear from you about how they are resonating with you; what they mean to you personally and how you’ll translate them into practice in your roles.
Speak Up
Speaking up isn’t always an easy thing to do, but it is always the right thing to do! It’s something really positive that we can all do for our business; even if we’re highlighting something that we’re not doing well. It’s how we learn and improve. But ‘Speak Up’ is more than raising your hand. It’s about each of us feeling confident to make suggestions, to challenge decisions or practices and to say that something doesn’t feel right. All safe in the knowledge that we will not face any form of retaliation for having this courage. Imagine how great our company will be when we’re truly hearing everyone’s voice!
Improve
We all have an individual perspective, partly based on who we are and partly based on what we do in the business. Bringing together those perspectives and collaborating – in our teams, throughout our brands and also across the whole Carnival family will create a strong platform from which we can live out our ambition to keep improving. Improving means choosing the best way, not always the easy way. We must invest time and energy to deliver safe, environmentally sound and compliant operations in the most sustainable way for the long-term good. That means we need to take the time to stand back and take account of what we’ve seen and heard before forming decisions.
Respect & Protect
Our business can only succeed if we are all safe, respected and treated fairly. Respect and Protect means making sure we never compromise on safety and the wellbeing of our people. We all have unique talents and perspectives that we need to shout about! By starting with each other we create the foundation for being the best citizens we can be. We all have a huge privilege and shared responsibility for ensuring that we’re doing the best by each other, our guests, our planet and our company.
Listen & Learn
Listening means more than just hearing what someone says! It’s about showing that you’ve taken on board a colleague’s views through a thoughtful response and follow up. Learning means taking what we hear and turning it into actions where appropriate. With a wonderfully diverse Carnival UK community we have access to so many different perspectives. We need to ensure that we’re truly making the most of that! We all try our best to do things right, but being human, naturally we will all make mistakes from time to time. We must recognise that mistakes present us with a valuable opportunity to improve – through truly listening to each other when mistakes are made we’ll learn how to get a better outcome next time.
Communicate
We all communicate in various ways every day. What is really important is what we communicate and how we do it. We must be respectful of each other, and we must communicate openly and clearly, avoiding confusion and unnecessary complexity. Transparency is key and we need to make sure we take the time to be fully understood; it enables everyone to participate. We’re all equals and we all have valued opinions so we need to consider how to ensure that these are heard.
Empower
‘Empower’ is all about getting to a place of trust with colleagues. It’s about setting each other up to succeed by motivating each other to do our best work. Whilst physical tools are of course important, the key thing to start with is time. Giving others our time enables us to truly understand how to best support each other – as individuals. Taking time to understand individual needs enables us to target training, tools and technologies for particular tasks and individuals. Empowering each other in this way will enable us to truly harness the huge amount of energy and skill within our workforce and help us all to realise our potential, whatever our role.
Thank you to all of you for playing your part and for your commitment to the culture of Carnival UK.
Jane
Jane Cripps
Ethics & Compliance Officer, Carnival UK