The Real Reason Behind Your Employee Turnover — and a Feasible Fix

After seeing the way that many executives approach compliance at their organizations, I’ve decided it’s time to get real — so my apologies ahead of time.

It will surprise no one that workplace stress is a leading contributor to employee turnover. A recent study found that 40 percent of employee turnover is due to stress, and another 35 percent of personnel have seriously considered switching jobs because of stress. That’s three-quarters of your employees.

This also shouldn’t surprise any senior managers, but I have the feeling that it will: managing compliance can be unbelievably stressful, and chances are you’re wearing out your personnel at a ridiculous pace. If they haven’t quit yet, they’re sure as hell considering it.

Since TCT’s inception, we’ve continuously seen executive leaders who don’t have a damn clue what sheer levels of absolute misery their compliance personnel are going through.

When your best people are walking away from your company to greener, less painful pastures, it’s time to ask hard questions about why good employees are leaving your organization. That means having real conversations with the people in the trenches.

Find out what their working conditions are actually like — not what you think they’re like, or what managers tell you they’re like. Find out from the workers themselves. Ask them about the pains, frustrations, and roadblocks of their daily jobs.

If you want to reduce turnover and retain more employees, your executive leaders need to see for themselves what it’s really like to work for the organization. Leadership needs to realize it is their responsibility to improve working conditions and make compliance workers’ jobs suck as little as possible.

Compliance Management Is Really F#$king Challenging

Your employees are tired of wasting their time manually tracking items, or wasting their time building and maintaining internal systems to help them do their jobs — constantly tweaking and modifying homegrown workaround solutions. They’re tired of spending valuable hours every week — literally hours — just to get ready for a single status meeting.

Did you know that every time you’re manually tracking compliance and ask your compliance manager for a status update, you’re sending them off to dedicate several hours to that task? That’s not an exaggeration. Almost universally, it takes 3-6 hours for a compliance manager to accurately assess their team’s status.

The irony is that by the time the compliance person finishes updating the status, the status report is already outdated.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg of colossal wastes of time. If a simple status report is that painful, imagine what it’s like to get anything done on a compliance engagement: putting together daily nag emails, begging personnel to provision evidence, crisis negotiations with other middle level managers for the time of their personnel — the list goes on and on.

Why the hell would anyone stick around at a job like that? It shouldn’t be a mystery why you have a turnover problem among security and compliance employees.

Some issues are so deeply ingrained into the organization, there’s no path to a happy place unless leadership sees the real resolution. The good news is that making compliance management suck less is not an insurmountable problem. In fact, the solution is attainable for any company.

Reduce the Chaos, Reduce the Turnover

The root cause of your compliance personnel’s pain is chaos. Everything is done manually and it’s done inconsistently. There’s very little organization, and the compliance manager quickly becomes little more than human glue trying to hold everything together without losing their damn mind.

Not only does the compliance manager spend the majority of their time herding cats, but the cats keep acting unpredictably. That puts everyone behind schedule, tempers flare, and no one is entirely sure what’s been done or if it’s been done properly.

It feels insurmountable, but the solution is simple: eliminate the disorder and wasted time, and you’ll dramatically reduce the stress — and thereby your employee turnover.

The Solution: Compliance Management Software

A good compliance management software platform creates order and enforces that order long term.

When you have a system that does all of the hard work and all of the tracking, everyone on the team knows what the hell is going on — who’s doing what, and when they did it. You don’t need to wonder whether this or that evidence has been submitted. You can go into the system and see at a glance exactly what the situation is.

Weekly status calls take minutes of prep. You don’t need to spend hours preparing for them, and you don’t need to ask people for updates. It’s all there, live, at a glance. Instead, you can go straight to brass tacks and do something meaningful with the minutes of your life.

Next time a member of leadership does the flyby asking for status, the compliance manager can simply screenshot the live status dashboard, provide a count of who has what open, and go right back to meaningful work rather than blowing hours.

The overall throughput and efficiency of an engagement goes up by magnitudes when you leverage a compliance management system like TCT Portal. The system evaporates hours of onerous, dreadful, wasteful toil and complexity from people’s lives.

People enjoy their jobs so much more when there’s a systematic approach with structure.

It’s Not a Damn Expense

Too often, executives just don’t get it and I don’t understand why. They only ask why the hell they should spend money on another piece of software that does the same thing their people are already doing for free. They only see the solution as an added expense.

Investing in sanity, efficiency, and throughput isn’t an expense. TCT Portal is so effective at saving time and making life easy for your people that you will save more money than you spend. You’ll actually make money with TCT Portal at the end of the day.

TCT Portal makes such a difference in job satisfaction that we have clients who use the tool as a recruiting opportunity to attract new employees. They strategically use TCT Portal as a talking point during interviews to entice top candidates. It’s hard to say no to a job when you know your life won’t suck nearly as much as the last place you worked.

Your people don’t want to ram their heads through a wall every single fricking day. With TCT Portal, your personnel will be less stressed, they’ll enjoy their jobs more, and you’ll retain them more successfully.

See for yourself how TCT Portal benefits your business — calculate your company’s potential ROI.