Managing compliance across an extended organisation is a complex task that can only be achieved if the key players can be held accountable. Inherent difficulty and lack of immediately visible benefits make this a very challenging endeavour. This is true especially when the key compliance players have other performance pressures on them and with “dotted line” management, pulling workers in different, sometimes unrelated, directions.
Delays in transferring relevant information, such as manually collating status updates and sending via email, add unnecessary time to complete a task. The back-and-forth information transfers can drop a link and justify a break in accountability. But what do we mean by ‘accountability’ and why is it not the same as ‘responsibility’? Let’s dive in a bit deeper.
Below are a few popular definitions and key differences:
Dictionary.com
Accountability: noun - the state of being accountable, liable, or answerable.
Responsibility: noun - the state or fact of being responsible, answerable, or accountable for something within one's power, control, or management.
Diffen.com
The main difference between responsibility and accountability is that responsibility can be shared while accountability cannot. Being accountable not only means being responsible for something but also ultimately being answerable for your actions. Also, accountability is something you hold a person to only after a task is done or not done. Responsibility can be before and/or after a task.
Indeed (UK)
Responsibility involves managing tasks, while accountability focuses on the consequences and ownership of actions, typically involving a single individual.
In compliance, lack of accountability reduces your organisation's ability to run effectively. If unresolved issues and actions build up, responsible management is eventually forced to address this by either reducing the requirements or increasing the resources…or a bit of both.
So how does one make it easier for staff to take on the accountability to achieve and maintain tough compliance requirements, deadlines and goals?
Here’s how to increase accountability in compliance-intensive environments. This list is the result of decades of experience working in this space in different industries.
Looking at compliance from a judicial angle, there is extensive research and evidence from the justice system (here and far more here) going back to the late 1700’s that shows that increases in the certainty of punishment rather than its severity, are more likely to produce deterrent benefits.
In the modern workplace, this “certainty” equates to visibility.
As a manager, you want your team to know that you know. They need to know that their compliance actions, or inactions, are visible. When a person is aware that their manager has robust oversight of their compliance activities, they are less likely to be ‘distracted’ from taking required actions.
Visibility of compliance-related data is another powerful tool that will help you maintain accountability. If you have access to relevant information, you can see exactly which part of the process is lagging behind and hence the person.
Sticking with jurisprudence, another important aspect of deterrence is speed.
We’re accustomed to court cases taking many months or even years (in the US, prisoners can sit on death row for a decade awaiting an appeal date while Australia's longest-running court case took 404 days).
Research and evidence finds that swift punishment is the best means of preventing and controlling crime.
Extending this to compliance, acting swiftly is critical when a compliance activity has not occurred as planned, or as expected, or an issue or non conformance is left uncorrected.
For established businesses, compliance adjusts organically as things happen and improvements are pushed down the line. Implementing these is part of the organisations’ Change Management framework. However, once they are known, you need to ensure the monitoring plan is known, and transparent. The plan may include elements such as:
If your team knows what’s expected, gets reminders and knows how you intend to follow this up when escalated, they’ll be equipped to do the tasks and accept accountability for their success.
Compliance tasks have a strong information bias; they are weighted towards information rather than operation. To get the job done your team needs two more things: information and tools.
Reduce the complexity of the tasks by simplifying and splitting up the checks themselves where it makes operational sense. This will reduce the reasons for compliance task backlogs.
A pragmatic approach would be to recognise that when you:
Information:
Tasks that are complex can be supported by having access on the spot, speedily and correctly, to the instructions, assessment criteria or acceptable ranges as well as how to handle corrective actions.
Tools:
Using a tablet or smartphone as a tool, an online checklist completed on a tablet, in situ, is streets ahead in effectiveness than a printed PDF/Word form filled in manually at the workplace then entered on a computer in the office into an Excel spreadsheet or a non-mobile / non-OTG (On The Go) compliance software.
Human talent management, business coaches and change managers tell us that the “right team”, the “correct motivators” and working environments that are "cutting-edge will deliver unimagined performance.
Perhaps they do. But for us “normal” people around Australia, managing compliance from back offices of large warehouses, on construction sites, delivering NDIS services at people’s homes, running assembly lines or supporting software clients, these 4 tips to increase accountability in compliance-intensive environments, will go a long way to make compliance more “sticky” and less of a chore.
“Information Tools” are becoming smarter and cheaper even though technology inflation is running hot in Australia in 2024 (around 5% pa in 2024).
A decent wifi-connected 10” Android tablet with quad-core (Samsung or Lenovo) is around $400-$500.
If you have staff completing compliance checks such as jobcards, pre-starts, risk assessments, SWMS, assembly or service checks in the workplace, the ROI of a mobility solution is measured in weeks or a few months at most, even when issuing hardware to individual users, i.e. the hardware is not pooled and used by many.
Furthermore, these ROIs are based only on the re-handling of information to enter it in a system; we’re not even taking into consideration the time-savings that basic form functionality can deliver, e.g.:
Lastly, technology gives managers the ability to monitor progress and makes it easier to notice, identify and trend emerging risks that come with managing an extended compliance framework.
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