Anoek van der Riet
Compliance means working according to the law, internal procedures and established standards. Everyone in your organization, from the cleaner to the CEO, must behave accordingly. So if you want to improve compliance within your organization, you depend on the behavior of all your colleagues. How do you ensure that they act in the right way?
Improving compliance starts with motivation. If compliance is seen as an end in itself, it creates a check-off culture. In this way, it takes the form of all kinds of "thou shalt not" or "it must be so" rules. Not exactly attractive for employees to follow, let alone go the extra mile.
Look for intrinsic motivation to actually do better. Do you only want to comply with all the rules or do you really want to be a reliable partner for your customers? Do you only want to meet the minimum requirements or do you really want to make a difference? How can compliance not only align with your organization's norms and values, but how can it even strengthen them?
Communicating clearly about compliance
It is important to realize that compliance is a matter of behavior. Being compliant means that everyone in the organization behaves according to the established rules, values and standards. Therefore, if you want to improve compliance, the behavior of your colleagues must change.
Therefore, make compliance an integral and indispensable part of the corporate culture, which is founded on issues such as integrity, ethics and trust. Then it is important to communicate this clearly internally and include everyone in the story. Make sure that all colleagues within the company, from canteen staff to CFO, understand why compliance is so important and what it means to them. What impact does it have on their work? What behavior is expected of them?
Explain standards, procedures and rules clearly and effectively, focusing especially on why. Because when people understand the underlying reason, they feel more involved and are more likely to do their best to be compliant.
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Because compliance is not just about following laws and regulations, it has strategic value. Read more in the blog: |
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READING TIP - Why is compliance important?
Make it easy to be compliant
It is also important to make it as easy as possible for employees to be compliant. People simply prefer to take the easy way out. If the official, established process is incredibly complicated and cumbersome, chances are that colleagues will deviate from it and find their own way to get things done faster or with less effort. Therefore, provide clear and efficient ways of working that colleagues can easily follow and are therefore naturally compliant.
Process optimization and automation play an important role in this. After all, this makes processes more effective and efficient. It prevents employees from having to perform all kinds of manual and unnecessary work, and it also reduces the chance of (human) error. Not surprisingly, as many as 93 percent of professionals surveyed by Accenture agree with the statement that compliance is getting easier thanks to technology.
In addition, automation makes it more difficult to deviate from the desired procedures; everything is predetermined and the processes are set up accordingly. If it is determined in advance that approver X must approve a purchase order, then the automated process (if it is good) is set up in such a way that the purchase order cannot proceed until approver X has actually approved it. That while with a manual process, an employee may, consciously or unconsciously, deviate from that and proceed with the purchase anyway. While that is exactly what you want to prevent.
If the process is complicated and cumbersome, colleagues are likely to find their own way to get things done faster or with less effort
In an automated process, compliance is already ingrained, or; there is compliance by design. An employee is already compliant as a matter of course, because there can be no deviation.
READ ALSO: What does a compliant purchase-to-pay process look like?
Case study: compliant procurement process
But how can such a simple, automated process help employees be compliant? Let's take the "spend process," that is, the purchases that employees make on behalf of the company, as an example. It is desirable for everyone to do this according to established procedures. For example, to gain purchasing advantages, to comply with requirements set by regulators, or to have visibility into the suppliers with whom business is done, ensuring that these companies are contributing to your goals in terms of (for example) sustainability.
Especially indirect spend, the purchase of products that do not directly affect the primary business process, often still occurs unchecked. Employees make purchases without regard to the organization's regulations or preferences. When they need something "just quickly," they jettison the process -and thus compliance- and go looking for it themselves. They get on their bikes and ride to the store around the corner or order something from their favorite online store. Maybe convenient, but not compliant and uncertain for the organization.
User-friendly and as employees want it
To achieve compliance by design in an effective and relatively simple way, a procurement portal can be the way to go. An accessible, intuitive purchasing portal makes it easy for employees to order products correctly themselves. They can make their purchases only from preferred suppliers selected by your organization, which are certain to fit your organization's goals, standards and values. And with whom you may have made purchasing advantage agreements.
"Of course complete control over orders placed with different suppliers is a pipe dream, but there is a difference between giving employees complete freedom of choice and regulating this as best as possible," says Mees Walhof, Manager Procurement at TU Delft. "It is important to optimize the ordering process and make it as simple as possible for employees. In other words, don't give them an ocean with thousands of fish, but a pond with the fish you as an organization have chosen yourself."
He continues: "I notice that the user wants a kind of Bol.com experience while searching for products: one big database in which you can easily filter. Of course, it's very difficult to provide such a database that you can search all sorts of ways in a user-friendly way. Basware 's procurement portal comes close to the user's ideal search experience. This contributes to us having more control over the expenditures made in our organization's name."
In short; by making the process as simple and user-friendly as possible for employees, they are many times more likely to stay within the beaten path and not look for an easier or more efficient route.
Free whitepaper: Compliance anno 2023
Compliance is perhaps more important and more complex than ever. In fact, compliance is gaining strategic value for organizations, but it is not exactly getting easier.
What is currently going on in the compliance field? What challenges are there? How can you improve compliance in your organization?
You can read about it in the free white paper
Compliance in 2023: opportunities and challenges.
Anoek
van der Riet
Contents Specialist
Anoek writes daily about purchase to pay, order to cash and Robotic Process Automation. She enjoys diving into topics such as e-invoicing, working capital and hyperautomation.