Compliance Unfiltered is TCT’s tell-it-like-it is podcast, dedicated to making compliance suck less. It’s a fresh, raw, uncut alternative for anyone who needs honest, reliable, compliance expertise with a sprinkling of personality.
Show notes: How Proactive Planning Reduces Compliance Stress
Quick Take
On this episode of Compliance Unfiltered, The CU guys give you a full breakdown about how planning your work and working your plan can help to put your compliance mind at ease.
Need a better understanding of the symbiosis between business objectives and compliance management?
Need to fully gather how your compliance efforts can better align with the other needs of the organization?
Trying to plan your compliance objectives throughout the year so you don’t drive yourself crazy?
Have no fear, the CU guys have you covered on this episode of Compliance Unfiltered!
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Read Transcript
So let’s face it, managing compliance sucks. It’s complicated, it’s so hard to keep organized, and it requires a ton of expertise in order to survive the entire process. Welcome to Compliance Unfiltered, a podcast dedicated to making compliance suck less.
Now, here’s your host, Todd Coshow, with Adam Goslin.
Well, welcome in to another edition of Compliance Unfiltered. I’m Todd Coshow, alongside a man who is never not roasting some chestnuts over the compliance fire, Adam Goslin. How the heck are you? I’m never not, opposed to always, I’m doing good, Todd, how about you? Man, I can’t complain, we mix it up around here. You know, that said, I think at this time of year, everybody can appreciate being stressed, feeling like you’re up to your neck in it.
Hey, listen, real quick, you happen to mention that every single time I hear the name of that freaking song, I’ll always turn to my wife, I’m like, I always feel bad for chestnuts. Sorry, I’m back now. No, no, no, you’re good. You know what? I’ve never thought of it from that perspective. That said, I think even Chet would definitely appreciate stress this time of year. And in the compliance world, I hear, it’s a little stressful, huh Adam? Yes, that is for sure.
So, yeah, today’s topic, we’re gonna be talking about proactive planning, and its efforts to reduce compliance stress. So, I mean, it’s no secret that annual compliance cycles is seriously, seriously stressful. It’s tough to get through. The thing that makes it especially painful is, it’s not like, oh, you know, compliance fit, hitting the shan, it’s like a two day event and all we gotta do is make it through two days, it’s like, weeks, and months, getting through the annual push type of thing. So yeah, it’s a stressful time. It doesn’t last for a brief period of time, more often than not. When you get to the annual cycle, it seems like it takes the better part of a quarter to get through it, etc. It’s not just stressful on the compliance team, it has ripple impacts across the organization because, you figure the people that are actively involved in doing compliance, they do other stuff within the organization. And so, their time being drawn away from day by day increases a wide variety of different realms of stress within the organization. So, it’s just a tough time, it’s just a tough time all the way around for organizations to navigate.
Yeah, and organizations and individuals alike. absolutely. Tell me more about the interaction between compliance and business objectives. Well, if this is your first run into compliance, people are going to get surprised by how much of an impact the compliance engagement is either having, or about to have on the company’s ability to meet their business objectives. For most organizations, they’ll have annual or quarterly goals for the organization, and those goals have impacts kind of across the board. Staff in every department are called upon to go help make these things come together. And, the problem is when you’re in the midst of a compliance engagement, you’ve got a really heavy drain on personnel, and often very specific and important personnel within the organization. It ends up in various priorities that are competing against those business goals.
So let’s say your company’s target date for compliance is October 1st, that means that the team’s going to be wrapping up final touches in September. In July and August, they’re eyeballed deep in things. They’re probably starting in June, or maybe even earlier as they approach that first full year of compliance. So it’s hard because, you’ve got this wide-ranging impact. If you think about it, you look at the organization, and the impact to any company objectives, that means that your compliance stuff is spinning up at the end of your calendar Q2, and you’re working basically full steam through Q3. The people that are on the compliance team dedicate a good portion of their time in that Q3 period to being able to get through all the compliance stuff. So, it’s got a huge impact on the organization.
So how can one do a better alignment job, I guess is a good way to put it? Well, you know, certainly putting planning into that annual calendar of events, especially for those that haven’t gone down this path, or they’ve just got compliant, and now they’re going to be heading towards their first annual, etc, they still have time to think about this. But, if you plan ahead, you can hit your business objectives while meeting all of your compliance requirements without killing everybody on the team. The big thing is starting off at the leadership and executive level, from executives, all the way down to departmental levels, to build out a plan of attack. Start out by making some adjustments to the timing of those corporate objectives. They can still accomplish all the same goals, just in a different timeline, right? So if you proactively plan it out, with an eye toward, when am I going to get hammered with the compliance stuff, you’re not only going to help out the stress levels for compliance, but you’re also helping out the rest of the organization as well. The time frame that we were talking about a little bit earlier, about the whole, you know, firing up in late Q2 and busy through calendar Q3. If you put some forethought into which people am I going to need? How much time do I believe I’m going to need out of them? When do I see those things hitting? etc. Now you’ve got a vision for, what resources am I going to need to be able to check the boxes on the compliance side? And, you can basically carve out holes in the company organizational activity, as it spans across the year. So, maybe for those individuals that are gonna get hit really hard in Q3, maybe you go ahead and put them in the earlier part of Q2, latter part of Q4, load up Q1, etc, just so you can spread that out over the course of the year. It just makes it a whole heck of a lot easier.
Well, how should organizations plan their compliance investments? I think it’s a good way to ask that question. I mean, it’s obvious, you have to divvy it up over time, and throughout your resources, but what’s the best way to do that? Right. Well, for a lot of organizations, they honestly don’t have any idea how much time individuals need to dedicate to the annual compliance effort, especially, no offense to the uppity-ups within the organization, all they know is I went and I told this team to go get this thing done, and then they went through hell, type of deal. So certainly going in and figuring out if the person’s day job is supposed to be a 40-hour week, we can’t just lop compliance on top of that, and expect everything’s gonna be cool, especially for a couple of key individuals, legit, you could be adding 25, 30 hours a week to their load. like we were talking about earlier, it could last weeks to months, type of thing. So, you’ve got to go in and look at your compliance engagements, figure out what all material evidence am I going to need, that way you can kind of eyeball who are the folks that, would need to go ahead and gather that. I’d recommend putting resources into a couple of buckets. So, you figure those that are gonna be heavily involved in compliance, go under the guiding assumption that 50% to 75% of their time during the three months prior to compliance, needs to be done, that 50 to 75% of their time needs to be spent on compliance. If they’re moderately involved, maybe it’s 25% to 50% of their time, and those that are mildly involved, 10% to 25% of their time. Because that way, at least go in with allocating something to it. You’re gonna be better served, than just trying to materialize hours out of thin air, and expecting that folks are just going to carry that. It’s really, really tough , especially for organizations that haven’t had the experience of going through year one, you know, the end of a full year, It’s really tough. So, I would recommend take a crack at it that way. And, the other piece, the other element to this is that once you get through that first full year, now you have context for what those allocations really need to be. As I capped it out, as I was kind of going through that summary, maybe it’s not 75%, maybe it’s more like 50%, maybe it’s more like 90%, let’s get through it. And as you’re going through your annual cycle, put some notion into tracking how much time was who spending each week so, that I can get some better gauge of how much time am I gonna need out of whom? And while it may be Bob or Mary, etc. that’s doing this work this year, just make it a little bit more generic as you’re looking at it. What’s the role of the individual that I needed, how much time, etc.
And what you’ll find is that, number one, you’ll be able to go through and iteratively update those allocations year over year. Certainly it’s gonna get, it will get easier as time goes on. But, I’m telling you, the first year, almost across the board, is just an absolute crap show. Year two, as a full year, it gets better, but it’s still not buttoned up and whatnot. Honestly, for some organizations, maybe it takes them five rounds before things really settle out, to where they’ve got something that now is repeatable, where they’ve got things buttoned up, where they know exactly what they’re doing, who they need, for how long, it just takes time. So, my historical view of this, especially for those that are walking in for their first shot, is do not be overly aggressive with minimizing the investment of time. You’re always better off to have said, hey, I need Mary for 90% of her time for these two months, three months, only to find that I really didn’t need that much time. Way better to be in that boat than it is, trying to be in competition for Mary’s availability as you’re trying to go through the process.
That makes a ton of sense. What about the impacts of vacation and PTO? If you think about it, you’re dealing with an entire quarter, or maybe even longer of the year, you’re bound to have vacation requests, paid off time needs. It also depends, honestly, when is this period for your organization happening? If that three to four month timeframe before compliance needs to be done, if that’s falling right in the middle of summer, then yeah, you better really put on your thinking cap. Again, the whole point here is let’s plan to reduce stress, put a game plan together for some type of a slot factor in terms of your calculation. Whatever you really legitimately thought, maybe I really think I’m going to need so and so for 20 hours a week. Maybe make it 24. Just throw that slot factor in there. Then over the course of that period of time, you’ve got the allocation. If you know it’s summertime, then you may want to go in and have that discussion with the personnel, and just find out, hey, what are you going to need? I always take two one-week vacations during the summer, so I can spend some time with my kids, etc. Okay, great. Now I’ve got that into the mix. Put that on top of the compliance allocations, and plan that into the business objective, that will go a long way. The other thing for organizations to think about, especially as it relates to all the PTO time, is when is your on-site timing with the assessor? That’s something you definitely want to, number one, lock in with the assessor early on, but two, share that with the personnel on your team so, everybody knows, okay, this week is on-site assessment week, nobody plan their vacations for that particular week, especially if they’re critical to the interviewing process, or the overviews for the assessors, etc. That, again, will reduce stress, make everything better all the way around. You’ve also got to think about, we’re sitting here talking about holidays and vacations. But, you also got to plan for some sick time in there too, especially when stress is high, when you know, a lot is being expected of them, maybe they’re shortchanging themselves on sleep. We talked in the prior episode about, personal care during these compliance engagements. It’s hard, because in many cases, people are shortchanging themselves on sleep, are more susceptible to getting sick. So, you definitely want to layer on an additional kind of percentage of time for, for sick time as you’re going through the process.
Any parting thoughts and shots for the folks on this one? Well, I think we drilled it home fairly well, but, compliance engagements really are stressful, there’s no way around it, despite how much you may try, you’re not going to completely alleviate yourself from stress. Planning ahead will go a long way to smoothing things out, especially if the organization spends that time that we talked about, for lining up the allocations of people, account for the PTO ,account for the sick time, account for slop factors, plan your delivery timings appropriately. That’ll really help to align both the compliance and the business objectives. Because, it really sucks when you’re in the middle trying to get through your compliance engagement. And meanwhile, you’ve got people yelling at you about, Hey, you said you were going to get this done by here and where is it?. It just adds to that stress. The whole objective here, is to try to make this make this palatable for the folks that have to go through it. But now the bottom line is managing compliance sucks, and our aim is to try to help to make it suck a lot less.
No doubt. And that right there, that’s the good stuff. Thank you. Well, that’s all the time we have for this episode of Compliance Unfiltered. I’m Todd Coshow. And I’m Adam Goslin. I hope we help to get you fired up to make your compliance suck less.
