Compliance is a Complex World
Making sure your business is fully compliant can be a confusing, complex and time-consuming task.
You may need to provide external regulatory bodies with evidence that you are operating in line with constantly evolving regulations. Or your consumers may want to know more about the quality of products, the accountability of corporations, and your impact on the environment. Your organisation may need to follow a large array of external laws as well as internal processes, organisational governance and security requirements.
Navigating your way through this compliance quagmire can be a challenge.
Yet there is too much at stake to risk getting compliance wrong. It protects every aspect of your business and ensures your employees do their jobs well and safely. So, ensuring your business is fully compliant is critical.
The Role of Documentation in Compliance
Effective documentation is essential for a robust compliance program.
Employees need to know that rules and regulations exist, where to find them, and need to be able to read them quickly and easily. Poor employee performance can often be traced back to poor documentation resulting in non-compliance. So, an effective compliance program should include a process for creating, updating, distributing and tracking documentation.
Effective documentation educates employees, explaining both the processes and rules they need to follow and the specific procedures they need to complete to do their jobs. It contains the cumulative knowledge of an organisation and makes it available to all staff members. This can increase consistency in all workplace activities and contribute to a high-quality end-product.
The Documentation Challenge
Writing effective documentation is important, yet it can be difficult.
One of the greatest challenges in writing policies and procedures is getting people to read them and then to follow them. They can be very long, full of complexity and present a ‘wall of information’ making it hard for a reader to find the information they are seeking.
Visible Signs of Poor Documentation
There could be a number of reasons why your business is struggling to be fully compliant. And the quality of your documentation might be a contributing factor. Is your organisation experiencing any of the below symptoms?
- Too Many Mistakes
Whilst employees are often blamed for repeated errors, the root cause is often inadequate policies and procedures that are poorly written, difficult to find, inaccurate or out of date. These mistakes can cost time, money, and in some cases, lives.
- Missed Deadlines
If your employees are under pressure to meet deadlines, then they do not have time to waste searching for information. No matter the situation, employees need to be able to find out what they need to do, how they need to do it, and when they need to do it by. So ensuring that your sources of information are accessible, reliable, clear and effective can save time and ensure your team meet their deadlines.
- An Overworked Help Desk
High support costs from an overworked help desk may suggest that employees prefer to call someone for help, rather than search through existing documentation to find the information they need. Improving the quality, accessibility and effectiveness of your written support information can reduce the number and length of calls to support centres.
- Human Resources as a Help Desk
Human Resources (HR) can find themselves being used as an unproductive call centre when it is difficult for employees to find and understand company benefits, policies or procedures. HR may end up answering the same questions repeatedly rather than spending the time providing valuable services to support broader organisational initiatives.
- Form Submission Issues
Organisations create and require many different types of forms, and opportunities for delays and mistakes abound for even the simplest form. This may be the case because:
- It is not clear how to fill in a form, where to submit it and when to expect a response.
- The form recipient is not aware of how the approval process works or where they fit in the authorisation chain of command.
- An employee is uncertain how to enter information into a database and generate the necessary reports.
These form challenges are both unproductive and may put your organisation at risk of non-compliance.
- Too Many Customer Complaints
Do your customer call centre representatives
- fill out forms or follow procedures incorrectly?
- provide incorrect or misleading information to customers?
- take too long to find information?
These issues are likely to decrease customer satisfaction, productivity and regulatory compliance. Ensuring that your documentation is readily accessible, reader-focused and easy to navigate will help your representatives avoid these issues.
- Fines from Unacceptable Audit Findings
Audits that determine non-compliance result in fines and business disruptions that can be incredibly damaging and expensive for organisations. Yet these can often be traced back to documentation issues such as:
- inconsistent policies and procedures
- business communications that are confusing, unclear, bury key points or fail to convey important messages, causing employees to make mistakes.
Improving Your Documentation to Support Compliance
If your organisation seems to be showing any of these symptoms, then you may need to invest in improving your documentation.
Ideally, policies and procedures should:
- be written in clear, concise, simple language
- avoid information that may be quickly outdated (e.g. names)
- be action and outcome-oriented with consistent repeatable predictable results
- be unambiguous
- make it easy for the reader to find relevant information
- make important, critical information stand out
- be readily available.
The good news is that TechWriter can help you with the above. For 25 years we have been helping businesses like yours improve their written communication.
We use a structured approach to designing, writing and reviewing documents and online content, based on international research into how people read and absorb information. Ultimately, we help clients grow revenue, reduce costs and mitigate risk.
Check out these before and after documents to give you an idea of how we improve policies and write effective procedures.
