7 Steps to Risk & Compliance
Risk management and compliance regulations present organizations with a plethora of challenges and opportunities. Yet the bigger your organization and the more complex your processes, the messier things can get. In order to meet and address these challenges, organizations need to find a better way. Not just to deal with discrete regulations and to control risk, but to also to manage the interdepencies between them. Managing risk and compliance is not simply about managing the regulations and risks themselves, but also ensuring that all employees are operating in accordance with your risk framework, and that work is being completed in a compliant way. Achieving this means ensuring employees have access to accurate, up-to-date procedural information. The translation of regulations into work practices has another major organizational benefit - it provides the audit and documentation trail needed to demonstrate compliance with regulations.
Rapid response times
Being able to respond in a timely way to incidents is essential for mitigating risks and compliance breaches. Ensuring effective, reactive action and defining responsibilities, thresholds and deadlines is crucial to resolving risk issues before they blow up, costing far more money (and potentially far more reputational damage) to fix. In a highly competitive marketplace, safeguarding against reputational risk is an essential element of success. Every organization is faced with operational risks such as appropriate staffing and resource distribution, as well as financial risks, which include any number of issues from not processing orders correctly to delays in invoicing to employee reimbursements. Operational, financial, and reputational risks have far reaching consequences, and potentially an even greater scope than noncompliance.
Creating a strong compliance framework
Potential risk incidents within an organization are often quite similar, or follow a similar structure and response pattern. Defining incident models and ensuring a strong and adaptable compliance framework will ensure a standardized and comprehensive response process. To ensure that your framework is fire proof, it is recommended that you implement workflow processes to manage risks, as well as implementing controls and testing against a variety of scenarios.
If you would like a comprehensive guide on how to safeguard your organization from risks and noncompliance, then have a look at our 7 step guide to Risk & Compliance. It will provide you with concrete and actionable ways in which your organization can maximize its business returns from investing in compliance, and about the ways in which technology can empower compliance professionals with the correct tools to assess the impacts of regulations on the business and operating model, and to communicate information effectively.