Distractions on Your Way to Compliance Canyon

Distractions on Your Way to Compliance Canyon

We’re in prime summer road trip time now, so I thought I’d keep our compliance road trip analogy going for one more week. Let’s talk about distractions this week. The good, the bad, and the ugly. I’ve got a DO and a DON’T for you to keep distractions from mucking up your compliance program:

DON’T be the distraction that causes rubberneckers to clog up the highway

It’s a very public world we live in, and compliance and ethics slip-ups can take a huge toll on your bottom line (just ask VW). The best way to keep the rubberneckers at bay is to get pro-active with your corporate compliance program…steering away from being reactive. Audit your compliance program, making sure you’ve got a repeatable plan for each of your compliance activities. And take a look at the roles within your organization. Can you break them into groups to make it easy for these compliance activities to get to the right groups of people at the right time? We call this “developing a compliance playbook.” Going through this proactive exercise goes a long way toward both preventing “compliance crashes” and demonstrates to regulators that you are working in good faith the keep your fender benders to a minimum.

DO keep your kids happily distracted in the back seat

The compliance people I’ve chatted with in the past truly hold their employees in their organization in such a warm regard. Kind of like a mother hen feels toward her chicks. So I hope I don’t sound pejorative when I call your co-workers your kids. Of course, they’re smart capable adults. But, they’re also quite busy and don’t necessarily put corporate compliance as the top #1 thing they need to do each day. Keep that in mind as you’re developing your program. Focus on the ways you can get the right message to them at the right time…in a way that’s easy to understand. That means stamping out the “legalese” like Smokey the Bear hits a forest fire. And breaking materials down into easily consumed chunks – we like to call them “snackable” bites. Last, but certainly not least, make sure this snackable, non-legalese material is easy to get to. Not buried in some folder on Sharepoint, or even worse, in a 3-ring binder on a dusty shelf.

Slowdowns…distractions…next up is expenses. Let’s see where our road trip takes us next. Hope you’re all having an exciting (yet completely compliant) summer!

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Toby Graham

Toby manages the marketing communications team here at Compli. She's on a quest to help people tell clear, fun stories that their audience can relate to. She's a HUGE sugar junkie...and usually starts wandering the halls looking for cookies around 3pm daily.

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