Optimizing the Organization’s Compliance Metrics, Dashboards, & Training

Compliance today is a monumental challenge in the context of continuous evolution, vast volumes of data, and change within the organization, regulations, and external risk environments. From nonstop regulatory change to updated processes, the compliance landscape is always changing for each organization making it necessary to develop agile compliance processes to meet the ever-growing list of demanding requirements.

Organizations need to start approaching compliance and ethics through a strategy that delivers an integrated information and technology architecture – where the organization can engage employees effectively, analyze high volumes of data, and report on their findings in a timely manner to mitigate risk and remain compliant. If these activities are siloed and manned in manual processes that lack integration, the organization is going to be hit with issue after issue and never find the root problems or end up spending large amounts of employee time and resources trying to manually reconcile information to uncover what needs to be addressed.

The data and information collected from the organization’s compliance risk assessments provide an opportunity to support the compliance program’s effectiveness. The organization’s focus should be on developing the ability to have real-time insight into compliance and ethics across the extended enterprise. The DoJ Guidance specifically challenges organizations to develop and enhance this capability. Strong reporting and analytics require an integrated information architecture that can see across the entire organization and its third parties and see the complex relationships between them.

How to design Compliance metrics and dashboard

Your metrics need to be specific and unique to your company and what business it conducts along with what goals you’re trying to achieve as a whole and as a compliance program—there is no one-size-fits all list of these metrics. Best practice and regulatory standards call for risk-based program reviews to specifically account for an organization’s unique risk profile.

Compliance is not just about the back-office of corporate compliance and ethics, but it is about the front-office engagement of employees who make compliance decisions throughout every day. The organization needs a strong compliance and ethics portal, a singular portal, that delivers policies, training, issue reporting, compliance-related forms, communications, and reminders to employees and any relevant third parties.

Additional Read: The impact of non- compliance in Organizations

Implementing Effective Compliance Engagement

What percentage of employees have successfully completed training and policy requirements, including the results of any post-training tests and policy attestation rates? Are there consequences for those who have not completed?

Training and policy engagement needs to be conducted on the organization’s policies surrounding certain compliance and emerging risks. Organizations should look to integrate policy engagement and training management into the same portal – where employees can read a policy and take the training in the same portal and interface without jumping to different systems. There is also a need to be able to manage compliance communications and campaigns that might bundle elements together and manage these communications and activities across the calendar year.

The younger generation within or entering the workforce is highly adept with mobile technologies that integrate capabilities and experiences. Organizations should take heed and seek to integrate policies and training into a single portal and help engage what is the main front line of compliance in the organization more efficiently. The millennial and even Gen Z generations are accustomed to technologies that are interactive, mobile, and highly engaging, meaning organizations need to find a way to bring policies and training together in a similar integrated experience to be in tune with the changing world we live in.

Organizations need an engaging and integrated training portal where:

• Employees can come to find anything that might be necessary, such as resources, tools, and media embedded into the portal. Organizations should seek to leverage videos and other resources that can be integrated alongside actual written policies to help engage employees and provide better contextual understanding.
• Changes are reflected within the portal when an employee’s role changes. Policies and training that is most relevant to specific employees and roles should be easy to find within the portal, and individual users should be able to customize the training portal to their specific role and needs.
• Employees can provide comments on policies and even share policies within their network. An integrated portal makes it easy for employees to ask questions and receive timely answers to increase improved understanding and training.
• The organization gains a defensible system of record and audit trail of policy and training interactions to demonstrate compliance and communication to regulators, stakeholders, and auditors.
• With an integrated portal providing both policies and training the organization gets better insight and data. When issues trend in one direction the system can be mined to determine if the organization hired bad people or if the issue is that policies are violated because there is lack of training and engagement.

There has never been a greater need for compliance automation with an agile technology and information architecture than now. The back-end management and oversight of compliance is crucial to the overall continuity of the organization, and an effective compliance architecture and framework will engage employees and all relevant stakeholders to keep them connected and in tune with compliance – specifically as it regards to their roles and responsibilities within the organization.

A mature program gathers insights across these aspects of GRC. Perhaps the organization is seeing so many issues on a policy or risk because of ambiguity or because of lack of training and awareness. Leveraging metrics and dashboards can provide an efficient indicator of not just the potential risks to an organization but also how its different departments, policies, and processes have been performing. It is paramount for organizations to begin leveraging technology to complement risk management and augment risk identification methods and systems to bring about positive benefits to the overall organization.

It is essential for organizations to develop an integrated, agile, and collaborative compliance program and framework like VComply – built on common information architecture and framework. VComply allows for compliance, risk management, and assessment activities to be coordinated across different departments and functions of the organization, assisting the organization in breaking silos and making more informed business decisions.