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: The The Real Reason for Employee Turnover
Quick Take
On this week’s installment of Compliance Unfiltered, Adam and Todd have a straightforward conversation about the REAL reasons behind employee turnover.
Is it you? Is it them?
The CU guys will give a full breakdown on how your internal compliance practices could be impacting your employee turnover. Adam also covers some of the latest tips on reducing chaos in this arena and provides a road map to reclaiming your sanity.
All on this week’s episode of Compliance Unfiltered!
Remember to follow Compliance Unfiltered on Twitter!
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’s sure to cast multiple shots across your compliance bow. Mr. Adam Goslin, how the heck are you, sir? I’m doing great. Today, it is an extremely real possibility that’s going to happen. Well, today, as a matter of fact, we are here to talk about real stuff.
That’s right, the real reason for employee turnover. So let’s lay out the groundwork here for this conversation, Adam. Well, after seeing the way that a lot of the executives are approaching compliance, I just decided, you know what, time to get real.
So I’ll lay out the apologies ahead of time. This may be a more aggressive episode, shall we say. It’s no surprise that workspace stress is a leading contributor to employee turnover. Recent studies showing that 40% of the employee turnover is just due to stress.
Another 35% of people are seriously considering switching jobs because of stress. So that’s basically three quarters of your employees. And it also shouldn’t surprise any of the senior managers, but I have a feeling that it will. Guess what? Managing compliance is unbelievably stressful. And the chances that you’re wearing out, and the chances are that you’re wearing out your personnel at a stupid pace. So if they haven’t quit yet, then you can bet that they’re probably thinking about it.
Since we started TCT, we’ve constantly seen leadership at organizations who literally have absolutely no damn clue what levels of misery the compliance folks are going through. And when you’re working at an organization, and your best people are walking away to just try to save their sanity, it’s time to ask some tough questions, what the hell’s going on, and how can we make it better and all that fun stuff. And that really means having some real conversations with folks that are in the trenches. It’s something that I really encourage everybody from mid-level management all the way to the top, is it’s so super easy to just tell somebody to go do something and poof it magically happens. But somewhere between you asking them and it magically happens, that’s where the pain comes in and that’s where a lot of the fuzziness comes in, especially for upper levels of management. They just don’t know what the hell’s going on over there. And if they did, then they’d have a real opportunity to number one, figure out what’s going on. Number two, see for themselves all of the wasted time and pain and blah. And leadership needs to suck it up and basically realize it’s their responsibility to improve the working conditions ,and specifically making those in the organization that have to deal with compliance, trying to make their jobs suck as little as possible.
So tell me more about why compliance management is such a pain in the ass. Well, the reality is that compliance management is unbelievably effing challenging. Employees don’t like wasting their time. You know, it’s cool that you’re paying them and it’s cool that you have this really neato keen tool called Excel that you’ve burdened them with. It’s really cool that you spent years and years and years developing this internal homegrown system to you know help them do what they’re doing, you know where they’re continuously having to make tweaks and modifications, and changes ,and upgrades to that solution. When one of your certifications goes from version you know whatever version five to version six you know type of thing, now we got to go back and gut everything again you know etc. So, they’re just employees, generally aren’t a fan of just blowing time you know, they’re spending valuable hours every week just to get ready for a single status meeting. A lot of the folks in leadership don’t get it that, you know, when you’re doing manual tracking of compliance, and you just do the breeze by, hey, you know, how we doing on our compliance, it’s not just, you know, oh, let me tell you, type of thing, it literally takes, let’s say three to six hours, you know, to go and check all of their sources ,and check all of the files they’ve received, and check on status and follow up with so and so and, you know, blah, blah, blah, just to be able to get that pulled together. And the worst part about that is, by the time that you know, given that you’re talking three to six hours to pull this together, by the time they’re done, somebody has done something which has been made a change, they’ve submitted a new document, they’ve, you know, moved something over to you, they made some updates, or something they previously provided, the assessors push back 15 items, It’s the minute you started trying to get the status update, it’s already out of date. So, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, on just a colossal waste of time. If the simple status reports are that painful, imagine what it’s like doing anything when you’re doing a compliance engagement. Putting together your daily NAG emails, begging people to go get you the compliance pay stuff that’s needed, begging personnel to provision evidence, crisis negotiation with other mid-level managers for time of their personnel. And the list just goes on and on and on. You know, this is an arena that negatively impacts, especially the poor soul that you’ve waved the baton at that gets the dubious honor of, you know, managing your compliance, but it really impacts everybody across the organization.
So, why the hell would somebody stick around to just put up with this crap, you know? And, and the problem is, well, the problem is, is that if you think about it, right, you know, it’s, you’re not answering this, Hey, where are we at question just for one person, I mean, I might have somebody go blast by my desk on Monday afternoon, I might have another manager come by on Wednesday morning, I gotta have another manager come by on Thursday afternoon. You’re constantly getting these inquiries and requests and blah, you know. Some of the issues are really deeply ingrained into the organization. And there really isn’t a path to a happy place until leadership, light bulbs go on, and they’re seeing the problem, so they can become part of the solution. So it’s just a tough arena as you’re going through and trying to induce change.
Not tough and inducing change go hand in hand with our next topic, which is chaos, right? So let’s talk about the benefits of reducing the chaos. Well, I mean, simply put, if you manage to reduce the chaos at an organization, it, I use the word chaos, right? but it’s the waste of time feeling like I’m doing crap that has no meaning, you know, etc. I mean, there’s no better way to just suck the soul out of somebody that’s working at your organization than making them constantly waste their time. At the root cause of especially the compliance personnel, you know, pain, is that chaos. You know, everything’s being done manually. None of it’s being done consistently. There’s very little organization and, you know, really quickly, the compliance manager becomes nothing more than an expression I like to use, which is the human glue that’s holding everything together, while meanwhile trying not to lose their damn mind. It’s tough. And, you know, not only does the compliance manager spend the majority of their time herding cats, but the cats are acting unpredictably, you know? I mean, you might as well try to herd cats while you’re busy lobbing firecrackers into the mix or something. It’s just, it’s brutal, man. And, you know, all of this BS puts everybody behind schedules, tempers are going up and nobody knows what’s done, or if it’s done properly. And it just feels like when you’re in that situation, it feels like you don’t have an escape, you know, you’re just stuck in this constant circle of bullshit and it’s like, man, you gotta, you’ve got to get to a solution of, you know, eliminating the disorder, eliminating the wasted time, and hey, guess what? If you do that, now your stress goes down. We go back full circle to what I was talking about earlier, you’ve got three quarters of your personnel, you know, bitching about how stressful things are. Guess what reduced the stress and ding, ding, ding, the employee turnover starts to drop as well.
Shocker. Now, how can we help the folks out? Well, long story short is, you know, a good compliance management software platform creates order and enforces order in the long run. When you’ve got a system that’s doing all the hard work for you, it does all of the tracking. Everybody on the team knows what the hell’s going on. Who did what? When did they do it? You’re not needing to wonder if things have been submitted, whether from the compliance manager side or, you know, even the frontliners, They’re very likely, you know, that was Monday and it’s Thursday. I don’t remember what the hell I did. Did I submit all that stuff? I don’t know etc. So it’s on all sides, right? But everybody can go in and center on the single point of truth, go to the system, and at a glance, see exactly what’s going on. You know, the weekly status calls we were talking about earlier with, three to six hours of manual labor to just go in and figure out where the hell where were at, you don’t need to blow those hours. You can go jump on to the TCT Portal within five minutes and see What’s where, who’s got what? What’s the count with Mary? What’s the count with Angela? What’s the count with Rob? What’s the count with Frank? You know, did they do it? Did they not? Etc. In some cases, you know, maybe they attached items, but they just forgot to move it up the workflow. Guess what? That’s something that you can resolve in seconds on a status call type of deal, but it’s right there live at a glance. So instead of all of this wasted time prepping, now you can just go and get straight to the point and do something meaningful with those minutes of your life, that you’re not lighting a match every fricking time some manager comes by asking for status. And next time that they do come by, hey, all the compliance manager has to do, they go, they pull up the portal, they’ve got a dashboard, they can take a screenshot of it and email it to them. They can say, hey, hey, come here, look over my shoulder, here’s where we’re at, and go point to it right on the screen, etc. They can do that literally live in seconds, and not just constantly, never-endingly pouring minutes of their life into a bottomless pit. And so the overall throughput and efficiency on a compliance engagement, literally goes up by magnitudes when you’re using a compliance management system like TCT Portal.
The system is evaporating hours of onerous, dreadful, wasted time and complexity from everybody’s life. And the reality is, is it has a positive impact on those that are interacting and interfacing. Both the compliance manager is gonna be elated, whatever poor soul you happen to bedonk with the wand assigning them that dubious honor. But even the people that are frontliners, they’re gonna enjoy their time more because they don’t have to wonder, they don’t have to go and ask the compliance manager and hope they get an answer in a day or two type of thing, etc. Just like the compliance manager, they can go in, they can see this stuff live. There’s a systematic approach. It’s structured, you know, all that fun stuff. It’s just a world of kind of night and day. You know, as you go through it, I actually had, I had an organization that, you know, basically had been doing this stuff manually came onto the portal. And it was funny, right? I mean, with any new tool, it takes a minute to get your arms around it. It takes a minute to make the adjustments. It takes a minute to, you know, kind of shepherd the cats to follow this new process, etc. But once you do, you know, once you’ve gone in and everybody’s in lockstep and going and going and going, I think they’ve gotten into year two to three, something like that. And this, the primary point of contact from this particular organization just happens to call me up on some miscellaneous, you know, Tuesday afternoon type of thing. And it says to me, you wanna know what? He’s like, when we started this adventure and we started going using this, you know, using this system, I was ready to strangle somebody with what we were doing before. And then when we had to go in and make all the adjustments, you know, it was painful. But now that we are through that process and we’ve got the adoption, and we’ve got everybody in lockstep, and things are just banging, singing, all that fun stuff. He’s like, I just literally want to take a minute out of my day, call you up and say, you know what, you were right. And I appreciate it. And this is way the hell better than what we were doing before. And it’s that interaction, that reaction that I’ll get from folks when they go from the hell they were in before, it’s almost like they’ve stepped out of the darkness type of thing. That’s the thing that’s fun, you know, when they’re coming back to me, you know, having those types of comments, etc, that’s the part that I find to get a lot of joy out of.
Yeah. Parting thoughts and shots for the folks this week, Adam? Well, a couple. Yeah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna enunciate this one. It’s not a damn expense. So here’s the thing and what I’m getting at with that. Too often, you know, executives just don’t get it. They don’t understand the why’s, you know, they only ask, Oh geez, well, why the hell should I spend more money on some piece of software that does the same thing that my people are already doing for free? It’s like, Oh, all they can see is that it’s at an expense, you know, and guess what, you know, at the end of the day, it’s not an expense. You’re investing in sanity, efficiency, uh, improving your throughput. Those aren’t expenses. The TCT portal, sanity is not an expense. The reality is, is that TCT Portal is so effective at saving time, making life easy for your people, etc. It’s going to save you more money than you spend. And that’s like the shortsightedness of. Oh, geez, this is another bill, right? What the bottom line is, is that, yeah, you’re spending this money, but especially for your compliance manager, you know, themselves, you’re saving them just on holy amount of their time. But even for those that are provisioning evidence, even for those that are involved in the workflow, maybe it’s your, you know, maybe you’re going through it, but you have to pass all of your evidence up to an assessor, etc. For the folks provisioning evidence, it makes their world easier. They can instantly tell, what do I need to do? Is it done? All that fun stuff. As they move it up the workflow, interestingly, if it’s good, it’ll flow straight through and up to the assessor. If it’s not good, and there’s additional things that are needed, it’ll flow back down. Poof, I know that I need to go do something. You know, it’s saved so much time that you’re going to end up making money off of the dollars you spend on this. If you think about it, right? If I save enough hours across the organization, well, you know, maybe I was contemplating hiring an assistant for the compliance person as an example, they’re at the barrier and ready to pull their hair out. You know, we were going to go and spend another 60, $70,000 and go get somebody that can, you know, just basically do menial tasks for them, right? Well, guess what? Instead of spending 60 or 70 grand on an assistant for the compliance person, now they actually have time on their hands, right? So it’s like, you sit there and you go, is it worth the dollars I’m going to spend on the tool to not have to spend 60 or 70 grand? Yes. Long story short, if you’re looking at it from the, you know, general health and welfare and whatnot of the people internally, you know, you just look at how much easier their lives are. They don’t have all of this stress. They know what they need to go in and do. They can refer to everything in, you know, in an easy shot from the prior year, you know, it’s all right there. It’s all transparent. Actually we have some of the assessment organizations that will strategically use the TCT Portal as a talking point during their interview, so they can entice top candidates to their organizations because, you know, it’s hard to say no to a job when you’re living this manual hell as an assessor and looking over, across the wall to where there’s order, there’s sanity, my life isn’t going to suck, you know, etc. You know, you can have that conversation with these folks and whatnot, and really, you know, for those that are contemplating the moves as assessors, and that’s one of the first things that I’d be asking is, tell me how you do what you do, because, life right now sucks, we’re doing it all manually, or with some homegrown piece of garbage system. You know, your people really don’t want to be just trying to put their head through a wall every freaking day.
I would strongly suggest, just look at the tooling costs, look at it differently, you know, get the CFO to step away from the numbers for a second and really put together, you know, we’ve got ROI calculators and stuff like that that we’ve got available on the website, go in, and whether you’re an assessor or you’re a company going through compliance who we generally call applicants, either way, you know, go on, check it out, put together some real numbers to have a real conversation with your CFO, and let’s get out of this mode of the never-ending circle of stressful hell, and make life a little brighter for folks.
And that right there, that’s the good stuff. Well, that’s all the time we have for this episode of Compliance Unfiltered. I’m Todd Coshow. And I’m Adam Goslin. Hope we help to get you fired up to make your compliance suck less.
