Steps for creating a culture of compliance

For many companies, compliance is purely legal practice. Compliance management is the process of ensuring that your company and your employees comply with the required laws, regulations and standards. So there is a strong legal component, but it is also a practice. This is because compliance often depends on the collaboration between management and employees.

To ensure that your employees adhere to the guidelines and to take advantage of effective compliance management, it is important to incorporate the right values, ethics and beliefs into the corporate culture – in other words, you want to create them a culture of compliance.

While this doesn’t happen overnight, there are steps you can take to promote a culture that invests and appreciate compliance

• Develop a strong and agile compliance program

First of all, you need to ensure that you have a set of internal policies and procedures in place to ensure compliance and address any violations known as a compliance program. An effective compliance program is a fundamental tool for creating a culture of compliance.

• Set the tone of the tour

The culture spreads from top to bottom. Therefore, your company’s board of directors, directors, and senior management must set the tone and act accordingly to demonstrate the company’s values ​​in terms of regulatory compliance. Leadership should be directly involved in and monitoring an organization’s compliance program to ensure that it is effectively fulfilling its legal and regulatory obligations.

• Communicate the value of compliance

Employees are much more likely to commit to a culture of compliance if they understand that compliance can give your company a competitive advantage by, for example, enhancing brand reputation with stakeholders and avoiding financial losses due to compliance violations. If you choose this approach instead of presenting compliance as a necessary evil, your employees want to take compliance measures to support your company’s success.

• Make compliance informative and cooperative

All parts of your company should be involved in your compliance efforts. Everyone should not only know the compliance requirements for their positions, but should also receive regular training and education and be encouraged to share their contributions and discuss problems as soon as they are identified. Regular training courses enable management and employees to understand the specific risks of your company in the event of violations and to be kept up to date with changes in regulations.

• Use effective forms of auditing and reporting

Regardless of how clear your policies and procedures are or how consistent your training is, creating a compliance culture includes testing and reporting whether your compliance program is working or not. Identify and review the goals of your guidelines and use empirical data generated from your program to assess how well it is achieving those goals.

By developing better measures of effectiveness, your company can better understand whether its compliance program is on the right track or not and what changes need to be made.

In order to change the corporate culture so that it is geared towards compliance, consistent efforts and resources are required over time. However, this obligation is essential to ensure the security and success of your business.

If you’re looking for a tool to manage compliance across your organization, AVACOM is a single, integrated software system that enables you to achieve a proactive and effective compliance system.