The Human Side of Compliance: Fostering Accountability and Responsibility

A strong culture of compliance springs from the roots of accountability and responsibility. A growing number of consumers today choose to interact with responsible, accountable, and compliant companies that have their best interests in mind.

While the importance of accountability cannot be stressed enough, the word “accountable” isn’t exactly music to most peoples’ ears. Accountability goes beyond just taking the blame when something goes wrong. It is about sticking to a commitment and ultimately delivering it.

Let’s understand what accountability and responsibility mean in the corporate landscape, what makes them so meaningful for your organization’s culture, and how leaders and compliance officers can foster it in their workplaces.

Responsibility and Accountability: What Do they Mean?

In a corporate setting, responsibility and accountability are inextricably linked. This is why one cannot be defined independently of the other.

Emphasizing responsibility in the workplace helps individuals stay fully autonomous and committed to their tasks. If an employee neglects their responsibility for handling a certain task, they may have to assume accountability for the repercussions. When combined with responsibility, accountability ensures leaders and employees work towards a common goal without leaving any room for negligence. The powerful combination of responsibility and accountability is critical to creating a thriving culture of compliance.

Why Creating a Solid Culture of Compliance is So Important

A solid compliance culture brings the best out of an organization’s leaders and employees, protects it from crippling financial and reputational losses, and brings lasting success. Here’s why organizations must invest in building a strong compliance culture:

1. Enhances Performance

An organization’s compliance culture is directly linked to the way its team performs. A culture where leaders are proactive towards taking action, employees feel heard, and everyone is focused on doing the right thing boosts workplace productivity by increasing discretionary effort.

2. Fosters Trust

A great compliance culture fosters unbreakable trust. When leaders and employees trust each other, no misconduct goes unreported and no unethical act goes unpunished. A company that focuses on ethics naturally attracts more customers, stakeholders, investors, and employees.

3. Improves Company Culture

Your company culture directly impacts the success of your organization. When companies take ethics seriously, they naturally build a speak-up culture where everyone feels free to express their issues. A weak culture where people are afraid to speak up, on the other hand, takes a toll on the employees’ mental health, isolates them, and fractures the overall workplace performance.

How Can Leaders and Compliance Officers Foster Accountability and Responsibility

Accountability is often a two-way street and requires the efforts of both the management and team members. Here are a few ways leaders and compliance officers can foster accountability and responsibility when it comes to creating a culture of compliance.

1. Consider Onboarding as the Starting Point

Responsibility and accountability start with hiring and onboarding. Once hired, an employee must clearly know what is expected of them, what they will be equipped with to achieve these expectations, and the consequences associated with every action they take. When clarifying their expectations, leaders must make sure new hires trust them and feel comfortable asking questions or expressing themselves.

2. Offer Ongoing Training

Compliance training is never a one-and-done task. Instead, it is a constant process of growth and understanding. The best way to reinforce accountability is to keep your training ongoing and highly engaging. Enhance your sessions with visuals, role-playing activities, and case studies that focus on the importance of accountability. The goal of training must be to ensure your employees truly understand how they are responsible for creating a strong ethical culture.

3. Define Expectations

If you need your leaders and employees to be fully responsible for their actions, it is critical to set clear expectations. What should leaders do to ensure employees open up to them? What should employees do to put their best ethical foot forward? Once everyone knows what is expected of them, assumptions will begin to be replaced with action.

4. Show Ways to Encourage Ethical Decision-Making

A great starting point to encourage ethical decision-making is to lead by example. For instance, if an employee sees that the management chooses ethics over ruthless profit-making, they will naturally take the same approach toward handling their own ethical dilemmas.

To reinforce accountability, it is also critical to establish an honest and open two-way feedback system. In addition to following up with their team’s performance, leaders must also try to understand what they could do to be more helpful.

Accountability is never a one-time occurrence. Leaders must take the right steps to make it a habit. By being approachable and empathetic, leaders can encourage their teams to take responsibility for their actions and express it fearlessly.

5. Reward Ethical Behaviors

It’s natural to punish what is wrong. But does your organization reward an employee for doing the right thing? Management must understand that what gets rewarded gets repeated. If your employee handles an ethically challenging situation with integrity, make sure you reward them for it. This will not only ensure the employee continues to act ethically but also encourage the entire workplace to follow suit.

6. Encourage a Proactive Approach Towards Accountability

Rather than seeing accountability in a negative context, leaders can take a positive, clear, and proactive approach towards it. Once you’ve set clear expectations, make sure you lay out an equally clear roadmap toward meeting those expectations. This includes offering:

• • Clear capability by equipping your team with the skills and resources they will need for ethical decision-making
  • Clear measurement by investigating, tracking, and fixing every misconduct that arises in the workplace
  • Clear feedback in the form of reward or punishment
  • Clear consequences by ensuring everyone understands the repercussions of noncompliance

7. Management Must be Approachable

An employee who is afraid to reach out to the management would either keep their problem to themselves or take it elsewhere. If they keep a problem to themselves, it begins to take a toll on their mental health and productivity. On the other hand, if the problem escapes the company premises and ends up on social media, the organization ends up suffering heavy financial and reputational losses.

A climate of accountability can be fostered only if the management keeps their doors open to their employees’ issues. Leaders must also learn to be vulnerable and not shy away from accepting a mistake. When you lead by example, it’s natural for your employees to follow suit and become accountable for their own mistakes.

A Final Word

Although accountability and responsibility are important ingredients of building a culture of ethics, organizations must also consider other tools to ensure their compliance culture is a well-rounded one. These include result-oriented compliance training, an anonymous system of reporting, solid screening and monitoring systems, and powering data analytics tools to constantly measure and improve your culture.