Episode 28 – Part 1 – What is professional conduct in surveying? with Christine O’Rourke, RICS

The following transcript is autogenerated so may contain errors.

Matt Nally  

On this week’s episode, we have Christine from the RICS. So thank you very much for coming on.

Christine O’Rourke

Thanks for inviting me, Matt.

Matt Nally

No problem, would you want to introduce yourself and what your role is? Yeah, so

Christine O’Rourke

I am responsible at RCS for professional conduct standards, and also for regulatory policy. So the standards that we set, which aren’t about sort of technical surveying, and then also, you know, how we regulate who we regulate those sorts of questions.

Matt Nally

Also, I think there’s some quite interesting topics, we’re going to come on to today across what professional conduct is, and ADR and all that type of stuff. For this, first off, what should we start with? What are the key what is professional conduct? Where that what does that mean, the RSCs.

Christine O’Rourke

So we, I think we talk a lot in our ICs, about what it means to be a professional. And I think it’s one of those words that we we chuck around a lot, but when you talk to when you talk to the public in particular about what they think a professional is, they talk about things like competence. They talk about things like public interest, and knowing that someone kind of has the interest of the client, but also a kind of wider public role. And they talk about sort of honesty and integrity and trust words like that. So those are the kinds of things that we think about when we talk about professional conduct. So they are how do you? How do you interact with people? How do you interact with the world. And we incorporate that in our rules of conduct. And they’re also conducted, you know, none of them are going to be kind of things that anyone is not expecting. They talk about things like being honest, following professional standards, providing a good service to clients, making sure that you’re not doing harm, respecting people and being inclusive, and also maintaining and working within your competence. So in broad terms, that’s what we mean by professional conduct. Okay,

Matt Nally

that makes sense. So there, are there certain areas that people accidentally fall down on, that they might not mean to like the competence, one perhaps, might be more obvious one in terms of doing some work where it might be on the edge of your skill set without realising. Or is it people generally get that bit right and other bits for them?

Christine O’Rourke

I think it can be challenging, and I think it’s particularly challenging, of course, in the kind of business environment we have now where, you know, money is very tight for everybody, people are having to find perhaps new ways of offering services. You know, new tech and AI is coming in and people are having to work out, you know, how do they use that? And how do they do that, ethically and professionally? But yeah, one of the one of the areas that definitely, I think there are, there are probably couple of areas. One is competence. One is, you know, being asked to do a new area of work. And that’s fine, all of us need to move into new areas of work, but it’s making sure you do it with some appropriate training, maybe some support from somebody else who already does that work. But also making sure that you’re not, you know, that you’re not doing those those things, which are kind of fundamental, like moving really outside your area of expertise or doing something that you don’t know how to do. One of the classic areas that we get is geographical knowledge. So particularly for people who are doing kind of home surveys and things, it’s really important that you know, the area that you’re surveying in because different geographical areas have different challenges and things that people have to know to be able to do that job competently. So you need to make sure that you’re up to date with all of those things. And the other thing where people sometimes fall down is customer service. You know, it can get very easy when you are busy doing the day job to remember that you’re dealing with someone who maybe doesn’t know what your day job involves. And we all know that as we’re doing work, things can change, you know, unexpected things can come up that maybe might change the price that you need to charge for something or might change timescales, things like that. And it’s very easy for people to forget to tell their client that that’s that those things have changed, or to have discussions with their clients about You know, what they want in those changed circumstances. And that’s sometimes another thing we see where people, perhaps inadvertently, because they’re busy, because they don’t think the same way that their client does just fall down on professional conduct.

Matt Nally

That’s very interesting. And it’s, I think it falls into that, making sure you’ve got the same understanding around something as well, because it’s very easy to have a conversation with the customer. And you think you’ve both understood the same thing. And sometimes it’s not until you put it back in writing, and someone can go, oh, no, you’ve we’ve both looking at this from a slightly different, different angle. And that’s not going to achieve what I wanted. So I guess what was good to follow up, I think and put those things down on paper. So it’s easier to make sure we’ve got a shared one a record as well. Yeah, definitely.

Christine O’Rourke

And that becomes really helpful later, you know, we’re going to talk a little bit about complaints. But, of course, it becomes it’s not the reason to do it, like you say the reason to do it is to make sure that you’ve understood and you can solve problems before they happen. But if something does happen later, having something in writing is really valuable to us as a regulator to anyone that’s looking at that complaint later. That

Matt Nally

challenges with keeping up to date with new rules and regulations. Do you do you find most people are able to keep up to speed with what’s, what changes that might be getting implemented? Or is that an area where I don’t know people maybe fall behind because they don’t see the email or that they’re busy, they still think we’ll read it later and forget, Yeah, completely.

Christine O’Rourke

And it’s a challenge for all of us, isn’t it? I mean, you know, the world moves so fast, and there are so there is so much communication coming at you so fast. We try to say when we are putting out new standards, or we’re changing something we communicate with members, Will, there’s an old professional email that goes out, that will usually give people information about changes that are happening. We also have an ICS newsletter on LinkedIn. So if you’re connected to us on LinkedIn, you can follow that. And again, that will give notice about changes that are coming up. We have something called the my ICS community. So if you’re in our ICS member, if you if you join that, again, we’ll usually post on there when we’re changing something. And the other thing, you know, outside our ICS you know, for particular areas of work in most government website pages, we’ll have something that you can log on to that you can ask to be, you know, have a weekly email about what’s changing on that page or, you know, new legislation that’s coming in. And things like LinkedIn, and you know, the presser trade press are obviously really important. But, you know, I completely sympathise with people, I think it is, it is very difficult to keep up to date with things. But I would definitely recommend to the LinkedIn newsletter and my ICS community if you struggle with making sure that you’re seeing emails coming in, because that’s a sort of weekly thing where we put things into a digest for people. Yeah,

Matt Nally

that’s nice. That’s the thing together the headline bit so you can understand what’s happening. Yeah. That just not something actually we sort of looked at beforehand, but there. What’s the process behind how professional conduct rules are put together? Is that driven by either like government regulations, or the public? Or the

Christine O’Rourke

it can be one of those things? Yeah, absolutely. So sometimes it’s government legislation. So obviously, there’s been a lot of changes and things like building safety and things like that. So we have changed and issued standards based on that. Some of it is to do with complaints that we get in and other is driven by the profession itself, telling us that there’s something where they want more guidance, or they want more clarity. And obviously, the new professional group panels that are being set up at the moment will have a really important role in providing that insight and feedback into my colleagues who work on technical standards in particular, but we also use it for all kinds of techniques for our conduct standards as well. So for example, we’re looking next year to address two big issues. One is anti money laundering, where we already have a standard. But of course, it’s an area that that continues to be really high profile and important for our firms, especially those ones who are working in, you know, supervised sectors. So we’re going to update our standards on that next year. And we’re also looking to draft a standard on decent of technology and AI, a sort of overarching standard that is about kind of how you use those responsibly as opposed to, you know, the those pieces that are about technically, you know, what, what technology might use for a particular area of surveying.

Matt Nally

It’s actually get interesting they’re going to be my next question. Obviously, we’re a tech platform. I’m not trying to push our platform specifically, but is there a changing role in how tech can support Rational conduct. Another other things to be wary of, because I think one of the discussions we’ve been having is what’s suitable or appropriate sorry, to, to automate and what’s not, for example, if we’re pulling data from somewhere, it’s good to be able to automate in terms of speed of getting it, but you don’t want to then bypass the analysis process and verifying the data is correct. So there, yeah, well, I suppose what’s the role do you think, for tech in the future, because you mentioned honestly, the AI aspects and other bits.

Christine O’Rourke

I think, I think it’s really important that that tech providers and professionals work together to kind of build a common knowledge about what’s important for each of them. So it’s going to be completely crucial for professionals to build their knowledge and understanding about how things like aI work, so that they can ask the right questions of tech providers, it’s going to be really important for tech providers to understand that for a professional, they have a really important liability to their customer in terms of how they use those tech platforms, those AI solutions, things like that. And there’s obviously ways in which, you know, tech will transform and improve the service that that people can give to their clients. But that’s really important that that’s done in a way where, you know, you can be sure about that the dataset being used is accurate, and people have the right to use it. That way, you’re using confidential client data that’s not going outside those bounds of what’s confidential in the bounds of the firm. And you know, that contracts properly provide for that, that you are transparent with your clients about what is being done by AI or technology. And then what’s being checked, and that at the end of the day, that there’s always a human element isn’t there? You know, there’s, I don’t think there’s ever going to be a situation in which you can just take a technology, Project product and give it to a client and think that that’s doing a professional job, because they’re tools, aren’t they, they’re like all other tools. And what you need to do is, is use them where that’s the appropriate thing to do. But then add your expertise, your understanding, your ability to check what’s coming out of his AI or technology solutions, to make sure that that’s right for the client, and accurate and all of those other things. So I think it’s, it’s really important, and it’s important that we work together. And that I’m sure, you know, kind of Andrew knight who runs our tech partner programme. And that’s something that he does an enormous amount of, you know, helping tech firms to understand surveyors and helping surveyors to understand tech firms.

Matt Nally 

Yeah, we were lucky to go to the tech part of the conference recently. So that was a, you know, it’s good to have those discussions. But yeah, I think you’re right. It’s a challenge. It’s for surveyors, as well as lots for surveyors. The challenge is ultimately, understanding what the technology is doing, where the data is stored, how it’s processing things, where the data is from, I agree with you on that, from a supplier perspective, is really understanding the needs of what you automate in the right ways, in order for it to be beneficial, rather than a liability. So you don’t miss out that analysis step. You’ve got to make sure that that doesn’t become certain things don’t become too easy. So that you’ve missed sets out I think. So yeah. Some some interesting, interesting challenges. I think around that. I suppose my my final question, and on this side of things, so what’s professional conduct? Are there common pitfalls that you see people go through? They’re very easy to avoid? Around this bit, so they can suppose can get professional conduct that much more effective? Because I suppose

Christine O’Rourke

I think that there are, there are probably two things that I would always suggest to somebody that they do, where, you know, they’re not sure about what the right thing to do is, or they’ve got a difficult question. Because sometimes professional conduct questions can be really difficult, you know, you might have a tension between what your client wants you to do and what it’s reasonable to do, you know, you’ll have you’ll want to keep your client happy, because, you know, we all want to keep our clients happy. We all want to keep the people that we work for happy. But you might have other other tensions about whether that’s the right thing to do. And I would say always involve somebody else that you trust in that conversation. I think that you know, where you where you’ve got something where you’re not sure and listen to your gut to tell you whether something’s whether you’re not sure about something as well. It gets very easy. I think I’ve seen lots of, for example, conflicts of interest. Cases where somebody recognised that there might be a conflict of interest. But then the fact that it’s very difficult to turn down work, it’s very difficult to go to a client who maybe you’ve worked for for a long time and say, No, actually, I can’t do this work for you. And so you find ways to kind of convince yourself that, actually, it’s not as serious as you thought, or it’s okay, you can probably carry on and do it anyway. And I think involving somebody external in that can sometimes just help with avoiding that tendency to kind of be a bit over optimistic about what you can and can’t do. And the other is the thing that we spoke about before, which is, you know, write things down. If you’re not sure about what to do. on our, on our website, we’ve got a kind of ethics, like flowchart that you can go through which which has questions that you can you can work through to say, actually, you know, do I have enough information about this? Do I know what the standards say about it? You know, what are the rights and the interests that are engaged here? How can I, you know, what options do I have? And if you do all of that, and you write it down, when you make a decision at the end, having years that process, even if somebody later thinks that maybe that was the wrong thing to do, you can show that you’ve been professional about it, you can show that what you’ve done is really thought about it, and tried to do the right thing. And that’s really, in the end all we can all we can do.

Matt Nally 

Yeah, that’s very nice points, actually. And it’s good to have something to reference back to particularly if you’re worrying about it, because you might not be thinking quite as logically and rationally at that point. So yes, it helps you to step back and reflect. I think the only other thing I’d add to that, which I think probably comes in with what you said anyway, is just taking time as well don’t feel rushed to make that decision. And if you’re being rushed, and it probably, again, is a sign of not the right thing to be doing.

Christine O’Rourke

That’s often a reason for concern, isn’t it? If you feel like someone’s putting you under a great deal of pressure when you’re expressing concerns about something? Yeah,

Matt Nally 

so we talked about, I suppose what a complaints handling procedure is first and then how we get to how you set it up? Yeah,

Christine O’Rourke

absolutely. So our ICS requires for all of our regulated firms, and for our registered valuers, they have a complaint handling process. And that’s not unusual. Almost all businesses that you that you deal with will have some kind of complaints handling process. It’s good for it to be public, we would suggest that it’s on someone’s website, so that when somebody something goes wrong, you know, clients know what they can do. And I suppose the other important thing to say is that the people who are entitled to use your complaints handling process for our ICs are the people who are your clients, so you have a contract to provide services with, or you owe a duty of care to. So you know, if you have a party that’s on the other side of the transaction, they’re not entitled to use your complaints handling process. We quite often get questions from from firms about, you know, the other side, the other side’s client is asking me to provide my complaints handling process, do I have to do it? And my advice on that is always send it to them. Because it’s good practice, it shows that you have a complaints handling process, but explain that, you know, it applies only to your clients and people in your duty of care. And so that’s not something that’s available to, you know, the other side of the transaction. So that’s that’s really important to know that you don’t you know, not everybody in the world is entitled to use your complaints handling process

Matt Nally 

was very interesting point. Actually, I’d only thought of it from the from the clients perspective, I haven’t obviously, there are multiple parties, sometimes in a in a process. And I haven’t thought about that at all. So it’s very interesting, what their scenario is where there might have been an impact on on a another party involved where they could could use it, or is it always sort of yeah,

Christine O’Rourke  

sometimes we well, that’s not where they can use the complaints handling procedure. We’ll go on to talk about ADR in a little bit. And ADR is a really important part of the complaint handling procedures that we need, that we require our firms to have. And obviously that comes at a cost to our firms. Because ADR has to be you know, is is an external process that has to be funded. And so that’s why we say that your complaints handling procedure only applies to your clients or people you owe a duty of care to. Now that doesn’t mean that if somebody’s outside that that group of people complains about you, you can just ignore that. They could have a right for example, to complain to our ICS if what they’re complaining about is it professional misconduct. So, for example, if somebody you know, the classic example we give is, somebody’s gone to do a home survey on behalf of a prospective buyer. While they’re there, the homeowner alleges that they were rude, or, you know, they broke something as a responsible business, you’re going to want to deal with that complaint, you just don’t have to put it through your formal complaints handling procedure and offer them the opportunity of ADR. But we would still think that as a professional as a business, you would want to look into that. And if something has gone wrong, look how you can put it right.