Aligning compliance guidance and internal controls must keep pace with the actual reality of employee business decisions. The SEC recently shared a Coronavirus compliance risk alert and it emphasizes the importance of policies and procedures actually guiding employee behavior.
Here are four methods to try to be sure what your compliance team is doing actually yields results.
Update Your Training and Communication Strategy
To effectively determine learning strategy in this unpredictable economic environment, you need to assess not only where your business is at, but also where your employees are at. You may need to re-review your risk assessment results and determine progress against your anticipated mitigation strategies. Evaluate what compliance struggles your high-risk employees are facing right now. Have these needs changed over the last six months or do you anticipate them changing in the future?
Your compliance training and communication strategy must be reflective of the knowledge gaps or application gaps your teams are currently working with.
Don’t have a training strategy or don’t know where to start? Start here.
Avoid Compartmentalizing Compliance
Compliance doesn’t sit squarely inside a box. It ebbs and flows based on the legal and regulatory landscape and business priorities. It is worth your while to share your compliance strategy, goals, and plans with your business partners. Even if you reviewed annual plans earlier this year, priorities likely have shifted and they are worth sharing again.
Communicate the compliance guidance and ideas you want to incorporate in order to minimize risk and support their business initiatives, such as revised sales targets or clinical results. You want to be seen as a proactive partner who they can come to for guidance and rely on for support.
Leverage Limited Resources
Don’t recreate the wheel. One well-done and effective compliance training program can have a far-reaching impact. Make the best use of your time and budget by incorporating compliance training and communication strategies that have been shown to be effective. This includes video-based compliance training, microlearning, interactive policy guides, and targeted eLearning that focuses on user experience and application.
Often times the custom content built for one initiative can be re-purposed and used elsewhere. For example, a comprehensive annual compliance eLearning course can be broken down into mini-modules that are used as part of corrective action. Or, interactive policy guides can be launched by a compliance team and then used again as part of people manager and new hire training. Another idea is to re-purpose compliance training video content as part of senior leadership quarterly announcements or ‘town hall’ style meetings; setting a positive and compliant tone as part of general business updates.
This leads to the final method…
Repeat, Repeat, Repeat
Keep compliance messaging top of mind by repeating compliance messages again and again. Using different content formats and visual techniques can make the same information feel new and fresh. To become a part of an employee’s true day-to-day decision making, it must be ingrained in everything they do. This happens through consistent repetition of core compliance messages.
Finesse what your core compliance messages are, and then try incorporating them:
- On company Intranet homepages
- Within company email updates
- As part of an internal compliance campaign
- In new hire onboarding
- Office announcement screens
- As an opt-in text messaging reminder initiative
And, many more opportunities for repetition are possible. Think through the touchpoints you may have with employees and leverage use them as much as possible.
Use these methods to help your team’s compliance guidance become a business reality, and be sure you always have a seat at the table.
