Building Workforce Alignment with Your Compliance Program
It’s been said that organizations don’t naturally cooperate—it takes real effort on the part of the leadership, namely the CEO, and the senior leadership to achieve true teamwork and remove departmental silos. While difficult to achieve, cooperation is vital, not only in terms of performance, but also for overall workforce compliance and effectiveness.
One way to achieve cooperation throughout your organization is to ensure your entire workforce is engaged and aligned in their role, with their team and with the company’s compliance culture. As many as 70% of US employees say they are not engaged at work – most often because of poor management. There’s no shortage of talent, but many of the most talented potential managers aren’t enabled in their management positions.
Technology can help organizations to align, manage and enforce the business goals with the workforce. Workforce compliance programs enable organizations to set company-wide goals and communicate the compliance tone from the top for the entire workforce to meet business goals. By establishing, managing, and tracking tone from the top goals, organizations can encourage middle management alignment and engagement with the workforce compliance programs.
Alignment is critical not only in the structure of the organization, but also in your policies. One area of emerging policy is cybersecurity, a major concern in any industry that involves big data. In order to protect organizations from costly data breaches, policies and security practices need be in place for the workforce. Additionally, employee and vendor agreements should be established that dictate data access and use. Having a process and training program in place to handle current and former employee access to data can help to reduce organizations’ risk.
However, to effectively reduce your organization’s risk, cybersecurity should be just one piece of your compliance program. A recent survey of CFOs revealed that uncertainties, including changes in policy and regulations, as well as the cost of compliance are all top concerns for organizations. It’s likely a concern at your organization as well. An automated workforce compliance program can help to educate your workforce, and mitigate risk through a streamlined system.
Without a system in place to manage risk and address misconduct, as well as buy-in from management, organizations are at risk of whistleblowing recently reported by the SEC. In one case—only the second instance in which a person in an audit or compliance role has been awarded a whistleblower award—a compliance officer reported misconduct after management “became aware of potentially impending harm to investors and failed to take steps to prevent it.”
Ensuring that the entire organization, as well as all policies and practices, are aligned throughout the company will help to reduce an organization’s exposure to any number of potential risks, including cybersecurity, policy and regulatory changes, and misconduct.
How to master alignment from top to bottom
Enabling middle managers to be compliance advocates
How managers affect employee engagement
SEC Issues Whistleblower Award to Compliance Officer
CFOs Respond to Uncertainty with Risk Management
