Raphael Richmond – Global Director of Compliance
To promote ethics at Ford, Raphael created a unique compliance app to better engage and train employees in good decision-making.
To promote ethics at Ford, Raphael created a unique compliance app to better engage and train employees in good decision-making.
Law students don’t necessarily dream of going in-house, but Ford’s decision to interview a few first-year law students at the University of Michigan helped the company reel in Raphael Richmond, who later became Ford’s global director of compliance. “I was thrilled to get an interview with Ford Motor Company, and even more thrilled to get an offer to come in for the summer,” she says. “And once I got here, I was hooked.”
Since then Raphael has devoted her entire legal career to Ford, and her team is a key driver in making Ford the only automaker since 2009 to receive the honor of World’s Most Ethical Company by the Ethisphere Institute — an organization that defines and measures corporate ethical standards.
“I want to try and make it easy as possible for employees to do the right thing, and relatively difficult for them to do the wrong thing.”
The core of her job involves guiding Ford employees across the world to make ethical decisions every day, or as she says, “helping employees Go Further — The Right Way.” To do this, she created “The Right Way” mobile app, which puts compliance information within reach at all times in smaller, more digestible bites. “I want to try and make it as easy as possible for employees to do the right thing, and relatively difficult for them to do the wrong thing,” she says.
The app has been a wild success and thrust to the center of the corporate compliance world. Because of this, Ford has offered the app open source for other companies to customize and use. To date more than a dozen corporate companies have contacted Ford in an effort to follow in our footsteps.
Raphael also sees how her responsibilities ripple across to those who buy Ford vehicles. As a mother of two, with one of her children already driving, Raphael puts a lot of thought into the vehicles that are responsible for getting her kids around town. “The fact that my 20-year-old is tooling around in a Mustang, I have a lot of faith in the safety features and the ethical dedication of everyone who contributed to create this vehicle," she says. "And that affects me on a daily basis.”