Five Essential Elements for an Effective Automated Compliance System
If you’re struggling to administer effective compliance management policies and trainings while keeping abreast of shifting regulatory requirements, you’re not alone. You’re very likely also dealing with solutions that over-promise and under-deliver regarding actually supporting your business goals.
To add to your burden, your Board of Directors and executive management teams are now requiring awareness and visibility into the status of compliance programs to ensure efficient implementation for your dynamic workforce.
So, what’s necessary for an effective automated compliance system that will actually help you? Here are five ways your automated compliance management system should work for you:
1. Enabled Workforce Communication:
An effective compliance program requires a firm commitment from your Board of Directors and/or the executive management team to set the compliance tone at the top. An automated compliance system needs to enable your middle managers to be compliance advocates, allowing them to send notifications to their subordinates about any compliance initiative and obligation. Executives and middle management must also have a communication vehicle that can administer and track policies, procedures, trainings and assessments sent to their workforce.
2. Intuitive, User Friendly Tools:
How many times have you been forced to use multiple archaic software systems that make it hard to find the information you need and difficult to know what actions you should be taking? Additionally, your employees often think these systems fail to communicate a culture of compliance they want to embrace. Instead, for them it’s just a box to check. Did they even retain the information?
With technology advancing to mobile devices and tablets, your workforce expects their organization will evolve as well. Your compliance system has to be intuitive and have user friendly tools, allowing both administrative staff and your employees to easily find the information they need. It’s pretty simple let your workforce know what they need to do, when they need to do it, and where they need to look, and they will. Your compliance system needs to act as hub of information for your entire organization, allowing them to easily access information.
3. Flexible & Customizable Processes:
Every business is unique and has its own business needs and processes for its workforce. An automated compliance system needs to be customizable and dynamic to intelligently manage all compliance activities and processes for any business initiative. Additionally, the system needs to be able to replicate existing manual processes and facilitate new initiatives and procedures. Bottom line is this: your compliance system needs to ensure that each activity follows a proper, documented sequence of stages to be complete and compliant.
4. Smart & Intelligent Assignment:
An automated compliance system should exist to ease your compliance burden by ensuring the right people, get the right things at the right time, and nothing slips through the cracks. Your system needs to have the intelligence to assign compliance activities to individuals within your workforce based on defined groups such as roles, departments, locations, or any other attribute. Organizations are constantly having to respond to regulatory changes so your compliance system needs to be smart and have the ability to adapt to changes that affect your business.
5. Accurate & Up-to-Date Monitoring & Reporting:
What good is an automated compliance system if you can’t get accurate and customized reporting and analytics for your compliance program from a centralized repository? In order to have an effective compliance program an organization needs visibility to monitor the status of all initiatives. Executives and managers need compliance dashboards, accurate drill down reports and real-time reports to show comprehension and effectiveness for all compliance program activities and initiatives implemented within your organization.
It is essential that your automated compliance system can deliver on communication, ease of use, and flexibility and it gives you the ability to monitor and report on the status of compliance initiatives to meet your business needs.
