Compliance is a priority but collaborating at a large scale with diversified inputs can create difficulty. Since abiding by the compliance and privacy protocols is everyone’s responsibility in the company, it’s critical to ensure everyone is on the same page.
The challenge for compliance teams is effectively managing & facilitating the compliance process across increasingly dispersed, varyingly interconnected types of organizations. The absence of a unified approach to communication regarding policies & regulations can put a business in a tough spot with regulators. How can organizations ensure compliance with regulations like the GDPR, ensuring that data subjects have the right to access if communication is happening in private chats? In regulated industries, how can companies ensure data is subject to the correct retention periods? How can compliance managers capture the critical communications involved in the process?
The answer includes broadening the focus from being purely outcome-based to accepting communication & collaboration as an inherent part of the compliance process.
Compliance professionals should have an established, well-understood & streamlined process allowing permitted employees to comment, add changes or provide approvals on relevant documents.
Sharing this document in a common workspace, instead of emailing or using online communications, is important.
Collaboration tools must retain all communications within the process itself. When it comes to providing an evidence trail of discussions, edits & sign offs, it’s then easy for compliance teams to provide everything in one place.
Compliance leaders should identify the biggest pain points within their company & adopt tools that will help solve those compliance issues. Investing in this technology can help save time, money & headaches down the road.
Establish a workflow using tools to enable remote & hybrid teams to collaborate on policy documentation.
Avoid using email to communicate policy changes or document edits & sign offs, as that doesn’t provide a detailed & accurate audit trail.
By incorporating these approaches time & money can be saved as they ease the GRC teams from the most laborious part of compliance management that is input management & content tracking.
Importance of Communication in Compliance