With the help of 110 employees across various industries, Software Advice set out to understand why company policy violations happen. While Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) software is revolutionizing how businesses track employee compliance, there are still businesses that see it as a luxury and prefer to stick to spreadsheets or traditional pen and paper.
However, the survey revealed that workers share a very different view of software based compliance management than their employers. In a survey analysis posted on their website, Software Advice released the following findings:
What we found is widespread consensus among employees that software is necessary to address the complexity and variety of regulations affecting the post-recession workplace. Compliance processes for preventive action, accident reporting etc. can be tracked in a variety of tediously manual ways, particularly at smaller organizations. GRC platforms that offer workflow modules, templates and governance features can streamline such inefficient, paper-based processes.
In fact, 73% of the employees surveyed favoured software controls above all other options. This was followed by emails at only 10%. The fact that not all compliance processes can be automated by one piece of software might be a discouraging factor for employers to invest their time and money into a new system. However, implementing an automated policy management workflow can reduce the stress on employees by ensuring that policies and procedures are being documented and executed.
What does this have to do with company policy violations? Well, Software Advice's survey says it boils down to the complexity and sheer volume of policies that they are expected to keep up with.
…More than a third of our sample is having difficulty in coping with the number of applicable regulations.When we add in the 16 percent of the sample that have issues with the complexity of applicable regulations, we can see that overall, the diversity and complexity of compliance requirements creates the potential for violations for over half of our respondents.
If workers are overwhelmed or unclear on company policies, then there are sure to be policy violations. Out of 110 workers, 54 admitted to conscious decisions to overlook policies. That number is certainly higher in reality since it is impossible to report policy violations for policies that they aren't aware of. Therefore, having reliable compliance management software in place that can help employees keep track of policy updates, as well as integrate them into workplace tasks and processes, is a worthwhile investment.
Other features of compliance software that are beneficial include: