Elevating compliance in your organization

Ethics and compliance risks have seeped into every corner of the modern business organization, whether that risk is a business partner offering bribes to partners in the supply-chain or a mid-level manager mishandling confidential data in corporate headquarters.

It’s only logical, therefore, that companies should want a culture of compliance to seep into every corner of the business as well. For many organizations that means elevating the profile of compliance within the organization, so that all parties involved — employees, senior managers, business partners — give ethical behavior the priority it deserves.

The challenge for compliance officers? Leading people to appreciate the compliance program, rather than resorting to threats in order to gain respect for the program.

If you want people to follow those policies, they need to take ethics and compliance seriously; they need to take the compliance officer seriously. Which means elevating your compliance program through a variety of approaches, from simple messaging to outright enforcement.

Secure Authority - Before trying to elevate compliance, compliance officers first need to secure the authority to do so. Senior executives need to support your efforts so other parts of the enterprise will know this is a company effort to be embraced, not just a compliance officer’s pet project to be endured or ignored.

Allocate Resources - Ideally, those senior executives will then go beyond moral support and allocate the financial resources you need to undertake the task at hand. Elevating the compliance culture requires budget — for messaging, training, technology, travel, or even simple administrative support.

Manage Expectations - Elevating the compliance program is much more of a marathon than it is a sprint. Even the most supportive CEOs and largest budgets won’t allow for an overnight cultural change. So plan with short- and long-term objectives in mind. Tackling shorter range goals that yield a concrete win sooner will help your overall cause, especially when trying to get additional resources as you execute more of your plan.

Understand what can go wrong - It’s not an impossible mountain to climb, but raising compliance’s profile across the enterprise is a mountain nonetheless. Don’t sabotage your efforts by ignoring the important initial steps of shoring up executive support and lining up resources before you act. Don’t oversell what you can deliver to executives or support will dry up quickly.

In conclusion - There is, of course, a fair and fundamental question executives might ask: Why bother elevating compliance at all? What’s the point of a more prominent compliance function?

Remember: ethics and compliance risks have seeped into every corner of the modern business organization. That trend isn’t being driven by any specific regulatory or legislative push, where cynics might hope that a turn of political climate would make all these compliance duties vanish. Rather, ethics and compliance risks are spreading due to a host of much larger factors — everything from social media, to evolving consumer tastes, to digital transformation of one business process after another. Corporate misconduct is more complicated and more transparent than ever before, at the same time.

Organizations must get better at getting all their critical parts (employees and third parties alike) moving in the same direction. That’s what strong ethics and compliance does: it brings about desired conduct in the first place, to reduce time and money spent remediating misconduct later. The more elevated and prominent the compliance function is, the better your company can function, grow, and scale.

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