Compliance - an impediment or an enabler?

Is compliance slowing you down? Is compliance proving to be an impediment to growth and scalability? Is your cost of compliance way higher than projected? 

If you or your organisation would answer 'Yes' to any of the above questions, then you are tackling the wrong problem. The problem is you have a 'Reactive' culture that doesn't let you get ahead of the problems and you find yourselves always managing issues and fighting fires.
Interested to read on, to figure out how to trace this problem and address it strategically with proven methods?
Well first let me share a bit about myself and my partner (both in life and business). We are dreamers, practitioners, doers, and professionals who have been thrown into the deep end of complicated compliance and business problems in different corporate environments. We focus on helping businesses apply method to madness through our vast structured problem solving and business practices toolkit.

Let's look at some of the common symptoms to identify in tracing this problem to begin with:

• Your risk appetite is low and you find it too conservative to grow
• Separate budgets and dedicated project/program to address regulatory compliance needs
• Majority of the change effort and investment is dedicated to regulatory projects
• A raft of compliance-related changes has made your processes and systems bulkier
• Only incidents, breaches, regulator nudges, and audit findings turn your attention to compliance
• Accountability often comes up as a key issue and Senior Leaders exchanging blames for performance gaps
• Traceability of controls is unachievable in processes, systems, and data  

Once you have traced the symptoms in your organisation, the next step is to identify root causes. This a non-exhaustive list, however, these are the usual suspects we have found in most organisations:
-  Lack of awareness - as with every other thing in life, being aware of your environment is the key. In this instance, it is having an understanding of the customer, community, and regulator expectations
-  Lack of right skill set - not having the entrepreneurial mindset and approach to dealing with business problems in a structured and strategic fashion
-  Fear of the unknown - no visibility and confidence in the business processes and controls in discharging the duties as required
- Unclear organisation design - tasks based accountabilities in the organisation in a departmentalised siloed structure
-   Cultural barriers - lack of shared ownership and common purpose amongst staff across levels 
-   Difference in process vs practice - either lack of process documentation or consistency in the application of processes leading to high key person risk
-   Manually intensive processes - lack of automation and digitisation of documents, processes, and reports

Now that there is an understanding of the common root causes, its time to look at some proven solutions to address these root causes:

• Customers and community first – build a culture of considering doing the right thing by the customer and community in each conversation in the organisation right from strategy and organisation design to projects scoping and productivity conversations
• Process-based organisation design - designing the organisational processes, policies, and systems that keep the focus on customers and help you fulfil your duties towards the community. A process-based design also establishes clear accountabilities and prevents dilution of accountabilities in comparison with a departmentalised or capability-based organisation design
• Proactive engagement both inwards and outwards – embed the study of changing customer and community expectations into the strategy process supported by regular engagement with regulators to assess the external factors to get ahead of the curve
• Capability and understanding in teams – focussed efforts to build capability in leadership teams around everything compliance and also introducing compliance as a day to day concept so your staff don’t see it as a thing on the side but something as important as $$
• Use of technology to instil Compliance in DNA – make technology everyone’s best friend equipping the staff with digital tools for capability but to also connect everything that goes on in the organisation to enhance traceability as well as automating processes and reporting

Now, you must be wondering the above solutions are easier said than done. This is where we can help!
For starters, we can help you assess your organisations compliance maturity to map out where you can focus your efforts. Based on your organisations need we look to partner with you in supporting you through this journey. We have digital tools and accelerators in house that can be deployed to expedite delivery as well as industry collaborations to help you hone in on a specific area of the business.
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Why wait? Take the first step to efficient compliance today and give us a holler!