3 January 2022
By Roger Kennedy
roger@TheCork.ie
Compliance is one of those things that can elicit a very indifferent response from your employees. Many people automatically think about compliance as being boring training but ensuring that your company is compliant is essential. So what can you do to create solid compliance every single day?
Reinforce the Training
While getting your employees to the training centres is the first step, if you want to make sure that your employees are compliant all year round, you have to reinforce the training they have undergone. Reinforcing the training helps your employees to pay attention to their actions and their behaviours. You could do this through a number of methods including:
- Reviewing key topics in team meetings to strengthen the messages
- Using visual cues, for example, flyers and posters
- Send email quizzes as a tiny refresher
- Encourage self-directed learning to allow employees to revisit any training courses as necessary
Identify the Values of the Company
One of the big reasons compliance is viewed as a box-ticking exercise rather than an essential core component of the business is because the culture of the company is not intact. You need to identify the values of your company to create a roadmap so you can establish the culture of your organisation. When you identify those key values, they become the main ingredients to what makes your business thrive.
Embracing Diversity and Its Many Positives
Training can only teach so much, but we have to go beyond this to communicate why diversity is so beneficial, not just to our business, but to the nuts and bolts of what makes our company intact. When we start to encourage diversity, we should also concurrently focus on encouraging empathy in the workplace. We have to remember that diversity is a way to feed problem-solving and create innovation within a business, but it can also create a lot of misunderstandings and conflicts. These conflicts can be overcome by fine-tuning empathy skills. It’s so easy to think of diversity as purely a racial issue, but diversity encompasses generations, culture, religions, and so forth. Encouraging a deeper understanding of our differences will greatly reduce any sense of discrimination.
Stray Away from the “Anti” Message
Sometimes we think that the best way to encourage compliance is to tell people what they should not do. However, we have got to go beyond this and teach people how to understand why they should not do something. When we tell people to not do something, we have to give them the rationale behind it. A deeper understanding is so important and forms the foundations of so many different areas in business.
Stop Making Compliance a Box-Ticking Exercise
What makes compliance a cultural component of the business is, very simply, the conversation. When a conversation is very one-sided, this gives way to it being a “do what I say” approach to work. Instead, start to focus on discussions and make the conversation a two-sided approach, and this will make sure that when you conduct business you are always approaching it from a holistic perspective.
