Your compliance team analyzes risk assessment results, communicates policy changes, responds to monitoring reports, and so much more. With such a broad scope of responsibilities, how do small compliance teams make a big impact?
Whether your compliance team has two people or twenty, you can achieve regional and global organizational impact by connecting with partners that see the strategic vision of your compliance program and can help you achieve it.
An Overwhelming Scope of Responsibilities
In one week, a compliance officer may receive a myriad of requests:
- “We need a draft of the new Code of Conduct for the Board to approve.”
- “Our sales team isn’t sure what to do or say when the OR docs ask them about off-label uses.”
- “No one can find our policies, nor are they reading them. Can you find a way to fix this?”
- “The risk assessment results are in. Now, how do we help mitigate them?”
Challenges like these, and many others, can often be traced back to a need for more successful communication.
In fact, training and communication alone make up a full 30% of an effective compliance program.
Be the Trusted Business Partner
The ultimate goal of a compliance team is to help guide a company to operate in a way that ensures compliance with all laws and regulations. This is done best by creating and nurturing transparent and trusted relationships with business partners—guiding them to know how to and want to operate in an ethically sound and legal manner.
Avoid Checking the Box
While you are pushed and pulled in so many directions, it’s tempting to create materials that simply check the box. This type of check-the-box content meets the immediate compliance needs of your business but lacks engagement and effectiveness. It temporarily checks something off your “to-do” list but doesn’t truly resolve compliance challenges or guide employee behavior.
Limited Resources Require Creative Approaches
Compliance training and communication can help compliance teams make the best use of their limited resources by using creative approaches to solve compliance challenges. Modern-day employees respond to information when it is presented in a way that captures attention and provides immediate value.
Effective ways compliance teams can do this is to use:
- Infographics
- Interactive policy guides
- Microlearning
If you can keep your employees engaged with compliance content, you will be able to enhance content retention and practical application of information in real-world settings.
Unique and targeted visual stories, alongside an outside-the-box approach to content design, allow limited compliance resources to stretch beyond traditional boundaries and create meaningful business results.
What You Say and How You Say It
The use of long and legal-sounding language turns many employees away from compliance information even before they have a chance to truly read it or engage with it. This is especially true since the average American reads at a 7th or 8th-grade level. The legal guidance and practical application of compliance concepts are core, but the way in which that information is shared may be even more critical than you realize.
Oftentimes an external eye is needed to:
- Streamline the flow of information,
- Narrow the scope of content shared, and
- Emphasize key points.
If employees notice a concerted effort to share only what is most relevant to them and their job, they are more likely to pay attention and connect what is being shared to what they actually do each day.
Do What You Do Best
Compliance teams may be tempted to tackle engaging compliance training and design on their own, but often become frustrated when standard PowerPoints, dull imagery, and dated eLearning tools don’t get the job done.
Corporate training strategies have evolved to keep up with the way modern employees learn, and so have the options that compliance teams have available.
By partnering with vendors who specialize in compliance training, compliance teams are allowed to focus on understanding business risks, changing regulations, and supporting business initiatives.
Provide Clear Guidance in Unclear Situations
The difference between an organization founded on compliant business practices and an organization that is not can often be narrowed down to the organization’s ability to provide clear guidance in unclear situations.
Compliance training and communication should resonate with employees and create memorable pegs of compliance guidance. Creative approaches, such as compliance infographics, interactive policy guides, and microlearning, can be used by small and large compliance teams alike to enhance the short- and long-term impact of their compliance program.
