Compliance: everything starts with people & values
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I had a great pleasure to start the Winter season among, indeed, brilliant professionals and super amazing Women@Law LT community last week. Here in Lithuania, we had panel discussion on the true price of compliance for a company and employees, during which I have shared our Fondia experience. I would like to share the key takeaways from the discussion:
Compliance is a culture.
The term “compliance” is evolving, getting broader and perhaps it may be quite challenging to find a precise definition. However, during the discussion the panellists have jointly agreed that first of all “compliance” means a culture.
Culture is created by the right people.
A lot of companies worldwide are moving to flat organizational structures, meaning that organizations supervise employees less. Accordingly, each and every organization needs to find the right employees who would be able to make the right decisions. For example, Fondia pays a lot of attention to recruitment process (time and financial investments) and all job interviews have strong focus to values of the job candidate and values of Fondia too.
How to enable the right people to adopt the right decisions?
When it comes to compliance programs, policies and procedures, we at Fondia encourage our customers to follow the same process that we follow ourselves:
Step 1. Do a very good, thorough risk assessment first.
Step 2. Once you understand your risks and gaps, you must determine what it is that you need to do in order to mitigate the risks.
Step 3. Once you know what you have to mitigate, then you can develop a method to do that. At Fondia we have leveraged technology and organizational structure to make sure that the processes are effective and easy to use. We have automated as much of the process as we can, while consolidating the necessary people input to a smaller group of experts to ensure efficiency, accuracy and effectiveness.
Step 4. Continuously test and improve your compliance program. In all areas we at Fondia are constantly looking for solutions on how we can leverage new tech tools to ensure that we get great results with as much efficiency as possible.
Step 5. Communication, training and… MORE communication. If your goal is improved personal data protection, then the conversation should always be about personal data protection. It is not enough to have a training or two, personal data protection needs to be on people's minds all the time. When addressing compliance process and procedures, be creative – use tech tools and legal design solutions!
