Compliance Management in a Work From Home Environment

Collaborating with and monitoring the work of the rest of the organization are essential components of compliance management. The compliance team is tasked with not just ensuring that employees are following the required protocols, but also that new employees are trained according to regulations. It is a tough job, requiring the compliance team to constantly be in communication with the rest of the organization. It is also an inefficient process in many organizations – the compliance team only has emails to communicate with the other teams in the organization and managing a trove of compliance data over email requires both time and patience.

However, as inefficient as compliance management may be over email while working from the office, it becomes exponentially more difficult and inefficient in a work from home setting. It is already difficult to get in touch with all the stakeholders for compliance information when they are all in the same location; it becomes doubly hard to ensure compliance when your team is spread out across the city or even the world. Another compounding factor is that many organizations do not have a work from home option for their employees.

Businesses that did not previously have a work from home may not have prepared a strategy for compliance management for a situation where the team is working from home. Businesses where compliance was of critical importance wanted their teams to work from the office premises to ensure that compliance processes would not be disturbed. Being forced to work from home has left many such organizations unprepared.

Working from home in highly regulated industries

There are many businesses which have successfully shifted to a work from home rhythm because the work was easy to do and did not require a lot of collaboration. Businesses in the IT sector have also shifted painlessly to work from home even though they require a lot of collaboration because employees in the IT sector are uniquely comfortable with technology and know how to use it efficiently. We cannot expect people in other industries such as healthcare, banking, or the energy sector to be just as adept at using technology to work efficiently.

Businesses in highly regulated industries need a compliance management solution which enables them to ensure the highest levels of compliance no matter where their employees are working from. Fintech solutions for compliance management have emerged as the perfect solution in these trying times. No one could have predicted that we would need to enable work from home in these industries, which means that the fact that compliance technology works so well when needed is an unexpected benefit.

Efficiently ensuring compliance during WFH

There are multiple features in compliance solutions which allow them to shine during work from home. Some of the most useful features are:

‘’Push’’ Compliance Reports

A major problem in compliance is that other departments often do not give compliance the priority it deserves. Compliance teams must often repeatedly ask for compliance information and reporting. This is ‘’pull’’ reporting – where the compliance team is responsible for pulling the information from other teams – and it is not an efficient process when people are working from home. Compliance technology turns compliance reporting into a ‘’push’’ function. Everyone is required to enter compliance information into the system and the information is automatically pushed to the compliance team. This ensures higher levels of compliance across the organization.

Audit trails

Having a compliance solution means that your team is no longer dependent on communicating through email. Emails are great for quick threads where you need input from a lot of people for an urgent matter – they are not great for matters where you need to create an audit record. If something goes wrong, the auditor will have to sift through hundreds of emails threads containing thousands of emails to track the required information. Compliance solutions keep track of all the compliance actions taken by employees and discussions that occurred about compliance when everyone is working from home, allowing for easy audits in the future.

Collaborative platform

Compliance solution don’t just focus on monitoring compliance levels – they also focus on compliance activities. Compliance solutions present a collaborative platform for compliance activities where executive managers can directly assign stakeholders to a task, the stakeholders can view all the required compliance information, and everyone can come together to complete the activity. Instead of coordinating over emails or instant messenger the team can coordinate over the compliance platform, showing the whole organization what they are accomplishing.

Progress tracking

Managers prefer to have their team working from the office because they can easily monitor their progress in different tasks and ensure that all milestones are reached in time. The problem with work from home is that managers must depend on the employees to tell them about the work being done and have no visibility into it. Since compliance solutions present a single platform for compliance, they can also show you the progress of compliance activities across the organization. Managers can work with the peace of mind that if any of their employees is having trouble completing a task, management can intervene and resolve the issue proactively.

It may feel like it is too late to implement a compliance management tech solution under the current circumstances, but that isn’t true with Predict360. Predict360 has one of the industry best implementation periods – it can be implemented in just a few weeks and is a cloud-based solution which can be used by your employees no matter where they work from. Want a demo of how it will perform? Get in touch so we can show it off.