As the coronavirus outbreak has sent entire organizations to work from home, departments are forced to find ways to collaborate remotely. One of the biggest challenges for remote compliance teams is knowing the status of everyone’s compliance efforts.
That means you have to be in active communication with everyone on your team. You can’t afford for someone to go radio-silent for a while, because it creates blind spots in your compliance status tracking.
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Communication Conundrums
For many remote compliance teams, communication issues are a constant challenge that adds to your compliance tracking workload. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest roadblocks, and explore a solution that can make remote communication easy.
Lost messages
Remote teams often rely on communications tools that are specifically designed for offsite collaboration. There’s email, of course, and chat apps like Slack are incredibly popular. But no matter what communication tool you’re using, it’s easy for messages to get lost.
Someone raises a new question in the middle of a long email thread
- An email CCs the wrong people.
- Slack messages get posted to the wrong channel.
- Mike Jones is added to an email message, not Mike Johnson.
- A chat message gets buried in a flurry of fast-paced conversation.
Now you’ve got a disjointed conversation, and important messages get buried, undelivered, or overlooked.
Hard to connect
When your team is all on-site, you can easily pop into someone’s office or hold an impromptu check-in. But when you’re working remotely, you can’t always tell when coworkers are available.
You can’t always tell what’s the best way to reach them, to get timely responses, or to meet as a group. Check-ins need to be more intentional, and meetings need to be scheduled ahead of time. Working from home doesn’t allow the same communication flexibility that onsite work does.
Slow response times
When you have physical proximity, it’s a lot easier to tap someone on the shoulder and ask a quick question. When you’re working remotely, you can send an email, text, or chat message — but there’s no telling how quickly you’ll get a response. Some people simply don’t reply to text or chat messages, and you might never get an answer.
Painful status call meetings
Status call meetings can be particularly painful. It’s not unusual to have internal calls twice a week and a weekly external call with an auditor that lasts a couple hours. During each call, you may have a team of ten people sitting on the phone while only a couple are actively sharing status updates. The rest are wasting two hours of their time, mentally checking out and getting nothing productive done.
Master Communication With Your Remote Team
There’s a better way to manage remote compliance teams. TCT Portal was built specifically for complex compliance management, from anywhere. Total Compliance Tracking has had client teams dispersed across multiple time zones, and even internationally.
TCT Portal compliance management software solves some of the most vexing communications issues for compliance teams working from home. Let’s take a look at some of the ways TCT Portal makes compliance management easier for remote teams.
Automated status updates
TCT Portal eliminates the need for long status calls and constant check-ins. Anytime someone completes a task, it’s automatically updated in the compliance tracking software. Status information is real-time, and it’s immediately and easily accessible by anyone on your team any time of day or night.
TCT Portal also helps keep everyone on-track and up to date by sending out automated daily status updates.
Complete visibility
If someone goes on vacation or is suddenly out of commission for a while, the rest of your team doesn’t have to worry about figuring out the status of their tasks. TCT Portal shows you a history of their activity right up to the last thing they did. You know the last thing they completed and what items are still in their hands. It’s all instantly accessible.
Organized communication
Have a question for someone on your compliance team? TCT Portal makes it easy to send a message through the system and directly associate it with the relevant line item. Anyone on your team can see the question and have all of the contextual information they need.
With TCT Portal, any communication is automatically tied to the relevant requirement. The system keeps everything nicely consolidated and organized. Anyone can ask a question. Once it’s answered, everybody knows it. There is no uncertainty about whether it’s been answered or not, or who’s responsible for it.
Clarified task assignments
If someone on the team needs time off unexpectedly, it’s quick and easy to reassign their items to other team members. You clearly see who has what. The minute a change is made, everyone knows, because they’re looking at the same information in the same tool.
Accessibility from anywhere
TCT Portal requires nothing special for communication and setup. The tool is internet accessible. If your team has an Internet connection, a computer, and a phone (for secure authentication), they can easily connect.
Secure compliance management
Total Compliance Tracking subjects itself to security and compliance regulations just like your firm! TCT uses the full breadth of PCI compliance to protect your sensitive information. Assessors and auditors use TCT Portal as their tool of choice to manage their engagements with geographically diverse teams.
Lightning fast setup
We’ve been doing compliance management with expertise for years. TCT Portal is a lean mean compliance machine at the forefront of compliance management. You can sign up to manage any of the industry standard compliance tracks available, and be up and running by the next business day.
Read more about it: You Won’t Believe How Easy It Is to Get Started with TCT Portal
Stellar support
TCT is built on the premise of helping others. We take great pride in delivering amazing customer service. Our clients regularly feel the love from our support team, which takes a fresh approach to serving our clients well.
TCT is devoted to the compliance management needs of our customers. We grew up in the compliance industry and we know a myriad of different standards.
The mission of TCT is to help others. We take the inputs from our customers seriously, and frequently integrate their requests into TCT Portal. You have a platform for voicing your needs, and it’s constantly making compliance management better.
YOUR Compliance System
TCT Portal is YOUR system — not the system that makes your auditor or assessor efficient. What happens when you want to change assessors? You don’t have to settle for a zip file of information from the last audit and start again from square one. You own the system and the data, which you mandate your auditor / assessor to use. This is your data, your compliance, your efficiency we’re focused on.
Better Together
In the midst of the sudden and frequent changes we’re seeing during the COVID-19 outbreak, it’s vital to have a tool that enables clear, cohesive communication among remote teams. As organizations transition from on-site work to a work-from-home arrangement, your success will depend on the tools you use to maintain order, efficiency and team collaboration.
We’ll make it through this turbulent time together. I’m very proud that TCT Portal can help make things a little smoother and easier in the midst of this disruption. We’ll have some challenging weeks and months ahead, but together we’ll make it through.
Discover how TCT Portal can strengthen your remote team. Get a demo today!
