How Metrics Help Avoid Common Compliance Mistakes

Many organizations reserve huge budgets and spend a vast amount of time on compliance, only to make some simple mistakes that cost them financially.

One of the issues is that compliance training is not the only important factor. We need to look at whether it gets measured and how these measurements are taken.

A lot of firms treat compliance as a box to be ticked and simply force their employees to attend a training and confirm they understand. Without assessing the effectiveness, this is not the best use of time or resources.

Here are three ways that metrics can help your organization to avoid common compliance mistakes:

• Recognizing Impact

If a company has not yet faced an audit or lawsuit because of compliance mistakes, they may simply not realise the risks of an inefficient compliance training . We tend to see this ignorance, or naivety, in smaller or newer companies, but well-established companies can be guilty of this too.

If you haven't yet incurred a penalty, you might not believe in the benefits of an efficient compliance system. This can be dangerous as you are blind to the dangers as well. Problems with compliance can have a huge impact on the business and your company's brand can be damaged quickly if you're not careful.

To help demonstrate to your team the importance of compliance, share data with them about how much competitors in your industry are fined and how often. You can then compare this with the costs of proper compliance training to show how reasonable this is considering the impacts.

• Applying Subjectivity

We cannot look at compliance training from an objective point of view. It needs to be adapted and suit the team that you are working with.

When looking at issues of compliance, the training cannot simply be a one-size-fits-all job. Your team needs to be able to look at the training that they are being given and see a clear connection between that and the job that they are doing. They need to see the benefits to buy in to the impact.

For example, your payroll and human resources teams would need compliance training on managing sensitive employee data to protect the privacy of the team. Your marketing department, conversely, would not need the same information, but may instead need training on data protection for customer email addresses or buying habits.

In order to keep your training relevant, try using "pulse" surveys to keep an eye on the feelings of your employees and get a deeper insight into how they see the training being delivered.

You might expect your employees to spend a long time completing their compliance training, but feedback may reveal that they simply don't have the time available. Having information like this can help you to free up time or make training more targeted so that it doesn't take as long.

• Updated Training

Companies know that the creation of compliance training can be a big investment, but if that content isn't then kept up-to-date or maintained, it can very quickly lose its value. One study found that developing just one simple hour of content can create around $18,000 but needed updating every 24 hours.

For bigger companies and organizations with complicated compliance needs, the cost of creating content can be a large, but essential financial burden.

Tracking the cost of content creation over time across the separate departments and comparing them to the cost of audits or violations can really help. This means that corporate leaders can spot areas where costs may not be producing the needed compliance benefits. That information can help them to reassess strategic decisions and invest in a refresh of the training content.

If your company simply doesn't have the capacity to review compliance metrics in-house, there are plenty of third-party compliance services and products on the market. These can often produce even better results with lower overall costs. As an additional benefit, they will always produce the latest content, fast delivery and great data management.

Although the costs of compliance can be huge, the cost of non-compliance breaches can be much higher. Most of the brands that we know, and trust are able to avoid bad headlines because they invest in compliance and proper training for their team. With the ongoing measurement of key metrics, you can avoid costly and impactful compliance mistakes and establish a brand that is known for all the right reasons.

Author Bio

A technical and marketing writer at Academized, Molly Crockett loves sharing her experience and advice with her audience. She specializes in digital and social media marketing as well as using technological options to improve business processes.