Fitting Culture Into Your Compliance Program

Culture is tricky.  Culture isn’t who we think we are, but instead, exactly what your organization’s workforce is.   When taking an inside look, it is often difficult to be honest when those two ideas come clearly into focus and a clash often follows.  Does your corporate compliance program cover or address this clash?

Really and truly fitting culture into your compliance program begins with educating your workforce on the importance of your policies including, code of conduct. This is the only way to effectively create change within your compliance program for your organization.
 

Now, How Do you Measure a Culture of Compliance?

This is even harder to do when you, the one in charge of compliance, is ultimately also included as part of the culture.  It gets very tricky to have an objective opinion, and the most helpful advice is “you” don’t.  If you want a real assessment of your company’s culture of compliance, including policies and code of conduct effectiveness, be sure to have a trusted outsider audit, review and provide their findings.   A fresh, non-biased and expert set of eyes is so valuable because that perspective is not tainted and entrenched in your company’s cultural environment.

Be a Champion for your Culture of Compliance

Lastly, model the behavior for your culture from the top and enable middle management to be the culture of compliance advocates for your workforce.  If the expected workforce behavior is not visibly represented within the middle management of your organization, you won’t get your desired response from your workforce.

Turning Up Tone in the Middle

Utilizing the tone in the middle is critical for an effective corporate compliance program.  Learn strategies in our whitepaper on how to leverage tone from the top and enable your middle management to be culture of compliance advocates.