The sudden shift to working from home has challenged management throughout many industries, including banking and financial services. A primary concern is that employees used to collaborating face-to-face throughout the workday can experience less productivity and effectiveness when in-person collaboration is not possible. This challenge is exacerbated in industries which require a quick response from the employees. Risk and compliance issues are a good example as risks need to be detected and mitigated as quickly as possible.

The managers have a firm grasp over their team when the team is working in the office. They can go talk to the team and provide direction and support, they can see the team working, and they can intervene wherever needed. When employees are working from home the managers’ visibility into communication, tasks and issues is limited.

The inefficiency of general-purpose productivity solutions

There are many productivity solutions available on the market which can help businesses manage tasks. Asana, Trello, and Jira are some of the most popular such solutions being used by thousands of different businesses around the world. The problem is that while these solutions are great in general work circumstances, they do not work well for risk and compliance teams. Both risk and compliance are complicated domains with a lot of regulatory and data privacy-related requirements, which makes them a bit incompatible with such solutions.

Another major problem is that workflows or risk management and compliance management are also very complicated. Rendering the same workflow in these solutions takes too much time and is very difficult to manage. Different teams also give different types of input when it comes to risk and compliance management. This means that not only will a business have to create custom workflows under these general-purpose solutions, but they will also need to create a variety of workflows under the same process.

All this results in the productivity solution causing a dip in productivity. Everyone’s productivity goes down because now they must figure out how to do their job within these task management solutions. Sometimes the workflows may stop working, which can bring the work to a halt. Forcibly molding these general-purpose solutions into a tool that is useful for risk and compliance teams just does not provide the results which businesses need to operate efficiently.

Using solutions designed for risk and compliance teams

Almost every industry which does critical and complicated work prefers to use their own specialized solutions and the finance sector is not any different. It is always better to use a solution which has been designed while considering risk and compliance processes and workflows. A specialized solution does not just deliver the same level of productivity that employees have while working form the office – such a solution increases work efficiency beyond previous levels, whether the employees are working from home or from the office.

Risk management solutions have workflows designed for risk processes. RCSA tests are a good example of how efficiently these solutions are designed. Share on X

Risk and compliance specific workflows

Risk management solutions have workflows designed for risk processes. RCSA tests are a good example of how efficiently these solutions are designed. The business unit heads are given access to a dashboard where they can view the assessment questions and submit their own RCSA reports. The risk managers are provided a different dashboard where all the responses by different business units are shown in one place. Once the RCSA report has been compiled the data from it is made available to the executive team on a different dashboard which shows organization-wide risk data.

See also: Automating RCSA for Enterprise Risk Management

None of these workflows need to be created – such workflows are already a part of these solutions because these solutions were designed for risk management teams. Similar workflows are available for many different risk and compliance workflows.

Progress visibility

Since these solutions are designed for risk and compliance, they also provide executive dashboards which contain risk and compliance metrics and task visibility. When a manager logs into the system the first thing they see is a dashboard which contains everything they need to be worried about. This dashboard will show how many tasks are behind schedule, how many new issues have been opened, as well as the metrics which are used to assess risk and compliance levels.

This means that risk and compliance managers do not need to micromanage – they always know what their team is doing, how far along they are in every task, and where they need to intervene. Thus, even as both the risk and compliance teams work from home, the teams are still highly productive. Partly because they now have access to workflows which allow them to work at a faster pace, and partly because management now has a much better grasp over all the work being done in the risk and compliance departments.

Are your organization’s risk and compliance departments looking for a more efficient way to work from home? Get in touch with our risk and compliance experts to see a demo of what our solution can do for your organization.