3 Ways Compliance Teams Will Drive Business Continuity Transformation

COVID-19 exposed how many companies weren’t fully prepared to effectively, let alone efficiently, manage their enterprise through an event that had such a tremendous global impact.

Many discovered that they needed to quickly pivot in order to be able to successfully fulfill client requests and manage newly remote employees. Yet they found that the tools and plans they had in place were woefully inadequate.

Secure communication channels

You may think you have the tools you need to clearly communicate with your employees: email, Google Drive, Sharepoint, Zoom, and all the rest that are springing up right now. But emails get buried and shared drives can quickly become overwhelmed with document drafts and versions – and that’s without being in the middle of a pandemic!

But in a time of crisis when things can change not just by the day but by the hour, streamlined communication channels throughout your organization are imperative.

This is especially true if you need to verify that employees have read or attested to the communication that was sent – whether that’s a new work-from-home policy, expense policy, IT security form, and so on. Additionally, there are going to be a lot of questions and requests from employees; how do you manage the volume of requests in an organized fashion or requests that may involve sensitive employee data?

Compliance teams can assist departments like HR and IT by helping them choose solutions that are secure, provide a single source of truth, and ensure compliance with how information is collected and how policies are attested to while being easy to implement and simple to use for increased adoption across the enterprise. An investment in improved, more secure communication channels is one that has an immediate pay-off with long-term benefits.

Agile, centralized compliance

Many organizations had to figure out (or are still figuring out) how to maintain compliance requirements with employees now working from home. Given the transition to WFH was so sudden for many businesses, simple processes that took only a few minutes to complete were suddenly impossible because they involved some sort of manual process or access to an on-premise database.

Shortcuts were developed and acted on for weeks, opening the enterprise up to considerable risk since, unfortunately, regulators and auditors won’t find “because pandemic” a forgivable reason for noncompliance, especially if that noncompliance involves customer data.