Every organization, whether it is a large company or a small family business, has policies and procedures that employees must follow. These guidelines lay down all the ground rules, from dress code to ethics. But these rules are only words unless employees follow company policies and procedures. If employees do not follow these policies, it can cause problems for everyone involved. But how do you know if your employees are following them?
Why measure compliance?
Measuring employee compliance with company policies and procedures is an important part of your business, but why is it so important?
- Identify areas for improvement. If you don’t regularly measure your compliance levels, you risk complacency about the success or failure of your policies, which can lead to unexpected problems if they’re not adhered to.
- Establish a baseline. Measuring compliance establishes a baseline for future comparisons, so when changes are made to policies or procedures, you can easily compare current and past results to see the effectiveness of changes.
- Give Manager Permissions: By measuring compliance, managers at all organizational levels, including frontline supervisors, can hold employees accountable for following policy requirements.
How to measure adherence to company policies and procedures
Test policy comprehension during training
Employees often leave training without fully understanding what was taught and later need more training. Make it standard practice to test the employee’s understanding of the policies and procedures taught before the training ends. You can test at any time during your training session, but we recommend testing at the beginning or end of each session so that you can address any issues that arise before moving on to other topics in your presentation.
The test should be repeated after 6 months (every year thereafter). This ensures that changes in behavior do not go unnoticed until they become critical business issues. By regularly testing employees on their knowledge of policies, you can identify things that employees may have forgotten over time and improve compliance with policies across your organization. Regular testing also provides an opportunity for employees to refresh what they have learned.
Evaluating fraud reports after training
After you complete your training campaign and review the results, evaluate whether the changes you made impacted your abuse reports. By comparing reported metrics before and after a training session, you can identify any fluctuations that occur. Fluctuations in abuse reports can help identify areas where training can be improved, and can make it clearer which policies are working as intended and which policies need reviewing.
An increase in cheating after a training campaign may indicate that the lessons were not effective or need improvement. The opposite is also true. A decrease in reporting after a training campaign may indicate that employees understand company policies.
Use surveys to measure employee attitudes
Surveying your employees is one of the most effective ways to understand how your compliance program is working. Anonymous surveys are conducted at least once a year, he recommends, asking employees about their adherence to policies and procedures and whether they have observed misconduct.
If you observe more misconduct than employees reported, it is imperative that you identify the reasons. Do employees feel uncomfortable reporting non-compliance? Are they unfamiliar with appropriate policies and procedures? Differences indicate that compliance policies and procedures training may need to be re-evaluated.
Source data from other departments
Ethics departments aren’t the only ones with access to employee compliance data. When looking for information, don’t limit yourself to people in that department. Departments such as human resources, training, legal, and benefits often record information about compliance violations and can be sources of information about employee behavior.
Once you have gathered all relevant information from these other departments, look at them together to determine which policies are particularly effective in promoting compliance and which are not. This will help develop future training programs and improve them as needed, and help build a strong culture of compliance across the organization.
Get feedback from the front lines
You can’t get a complete picture of compliance without including people who are active on the front lines. Managers and supervisors play an important role in monitoring adherence to policies and procedures as they are accountable to their employees on a day-to-day basis. By working with managers and supervisors, we can spot trends in workplace behavior and uncover relevant information about workplace culture.
Part of making sure managers and supervisors are doing their part to promote compliance with company policies and procedures is training them in handling compliance issues. When an employee reports a violation, managers must document it and notify all parties that appropriate action has been taken. In addition, employees must be informed that they can report compliance issues without fear of reprisal or repercussions if managers learn about the issue from someone other than the employee who raised the issue.
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