Compliance
From Overwhelmed to In Control: A Smarter Way to Track Compliance
When it comes to compliance, many organizations struggle. There are several regulatory agencies, and depending on your industry, market, geographical area, or mission, your organization may be required to prove compliance with more than one set of regulations.
That’s difficult enough, but regulations often change, and that can be hard to keep up with. Yet, if your organization falls out of compliance, you could be subject to fines or other sanctions. For this reason, we often hear from business owners who need an easy way to track and prove compliance.
We believe assessments are key to proving compliance — but most businesses need to change their assessment process to track compliance effectively.
Audits & compliance: what organizations get wrong
When tracking compliance, many organizations do one of two things:
They perform assessments, but they’re using their own in-house assessment tool — often an Excel spreadsheet.
They call in consultants to take care of the assessment for them and wait to receive a report.
In both cases, compliance tends to be assessed all at once, in one big often-annual audit.
There are significant down-sides to each approach. For one thing, neither approach scales well. For another, both approaches rely on manual labor, which can introduce errors into your audits.
The trouble with spreadsheets
Spreadsheets may seem like a good idea at first, especially since they’re inexpensive. However, spreadsheets are often the source of problems. They can become unwieldy if you’re evaluating several sites, for example. Multiple versions of a spreadsheet can cause confusion or security issues. You have to manually track results in a spreadsheet, and a spreadsheet doesn't automatically offer you an actionable list of things that need to be done in order to get up to code. It’s also hard to catch up on compliance if you fall behind and have to manually enter information — and that sort of data entry can cause errors.
The issue with consultants
Consultants can be expensive. It’s costly to send consultants to several sites, particularly if you’re using a team and trying to get an assessment done in a hurry. This can also lead to inconsistencies — if all the consultants aren’t using the same questionnaire or checklist, it’s likely you’ll get different results for every site. Conducting audits is a waste of experts’ time; you don’t want your expert checking off boxes on a list — you want their opinion on remediations.
How can you assess compliance daily?
Compliance is a lot like doing the dishes. You need to be compliant with regulations every day, just like you need to eat off clean dishes every day. If you let your compliance go until the last minute, it’s like letting dishes pile up in the sink until you can’t ignore them anymore — you end up with a big, intimidating project.
My biggest advice to any business managing compliance is to evaluate it regularly; daily or weekly. Tackle a few small things every day, and invest in a tool that lets you easily monitor your compliance, and which automatically keeps you up to date with changing regulations and rules. Spreadsheets will only make compliance more daunting, particularly if you are tracking compliance across several sites.
Security risk assessment software, like Circadian Risk, draws the relevant data from every risk assessment as the assessment is being completed, giving you a real-time view of compliance across your enterprise. When a site falls out of compliance, you’ll know immediately. By keeping up with compliance, you can avoid fines and keep your organization safe and secure.
Not sure where to start? Start here.
Circadian Risk can help you better risk, impact, and consequence at your sites.
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