Connecting Compliance

So I’ve been getting to thinking lately about why compliance programs are so resisted. I think there are a number of factors at play, and I KNOW that we as a profession in general are regularly looking at the question, trying to come up with yet another crazy way to make a business case and have it resonate with people.

I kinda get tired of banging my head against brick walls, don’t you?

So let’s look at what makes people roll their eyes and look for hiding places when someone with compliance in their title walks into a room.

1)????? Compliance means there must be a regulation we should be following, but ignorance is sorta kinda a defense, right? As long as I don’t know about it, they (the royal they) can’t do too much, and then I can deal with it.

2)????? Compliance are cops. They’re looking for all the ways we do things to bend the rules and make them work for us. They are the people who make me stop what I’m doing.

3)????? Compliance is unnecessary red tape. If I bring Compliance into my business, it’s going to grind to a halt, and be bogged down by form after form after form – I’m here to build/do/make something – not the least of which is a profit.

4)????? Compliance is the department of no – and this is a highly innovative and entrepreneurial company – I can’t afford to be told no if I’m going to disrupt whole industries.

5)????? Compliance doesn’t understand what we do or what we make/sell, how can I trust them to know what exactly applies to this company so I don’t hear “the sky is falling” every.single.day?

These are the 5 biggest excuses, and I’ll bet if we played pretend here for a minute and imagined that our companies were our babies (which is true for so many CEO’s), we’d never consider letting that baby go hungry, thirsty, or riding on the dash of a fast moving car without a car seat. We’d ensure that baby had a roof, had its meals, had its bed, and had the amount of nurturing it needed to thrive.

But would we assume we could serve that baby a cold bottle before it was ready? Could we put it in a hot bath? What if we tried to convince ourselves that a tin roof lean-to in the rain was sufficient shelter? What if we decided after all that to go without a pediatrician, hospital or vaccines?

Compliance really amounts to all those things that help the business build its own immune system. Gives it a chance to thrive and disrupt by enabling it to exist on a firm foundation of trust. Compliance is the trust mechanism. More than once this last month, I’ve seen HR people I follow on Linkedin warning people that HR is there to protect the company, and they’re not our friends. It’s an absolutely accurate statement.

Compliance is no-one’s friend and everyone’s friend. They are the medicine we take when we get sick, the vitamins we take to stay healthy, and the exercise we need to stay nimble. They have 1 job, protect the business AND its people from themselves. This often means that they play both good guy and bad guy. Regrettably that often means they are feared, instead of trusted. In actuality, Compliance people are the last people in the workforce to be feared, because, well, we have no allegiance. This is why compliance departments are expected to report to the board of directors or CEO, so that the independence is unquestioned.

So, do you think your business may be suffering a little from a sniffle…getting held up by an onslaught of complaints in your care department that are requiring you to pay up or do huge investigations to figure out what went wrong? These are signs your company needs a compliance function to help you bridge the legal to operations divide.

How can OnComply help you? Connect with me, and let’s find out!

www.oncomply.ca