There are many benefits to lifting employee engagement, but businesses often don’t consider how employee engagement can be an essential element of enterprise risk management.   

In this post we’ll explore the ways improving employee engagement and satisfaction can increase compliance with regulations and legislation, helping businesses reduce legal, reputational and financial risk.  We’ll also look at YakTrak’s enterprise risk management software that lifts both employee engagement and compliance outcomes.  

The problem with workforce compliance 

Businesses, particularly those operating in highly regulated sectors, know the importance of complying with legislation and enterprise risk management requirements. However, it can often be challenging to implement and embed effective initiatives to improve compliance across a workforce.  

Why? There are several reasons. 

• Clunky manual compliance processes. 
• Training that’s too often considered a tick-box exercise and focuses on the logic rather than the emotion (i.e., skipping the impacts that compliance has on the customer experience). 
• Ineffective employee coaching after a breach is reported. 

Fixing these issues may help improve compliance, however they won’t address one of the major barriers: employee disengagement and dissatisfaction.   

A workforce that isn’t engaged presents a major hurdle for businesses seeking to reduce conduct risk and improve compliance to ERM requirements. Disengaged and unhappy employees are more likely to: 

• feel that compliance requirements are blocking them from doing their work well 
• not participate in meaningful training and coaching 
• contribute to the creation of a culture of apathy, and 
• not understand the value of compliance and how compliance measures benefit them, the customer and the company.  

Engaged employees raise the standard 

People who enjoy their work and are engaged with their colleagues, team and organisational objectives are more likely to understand the value of compliance and what’s required of them. They’re also more likely to participate in training, coaching and contribute to creating a culture that prizes learning and development.   

Improvements in engagement can turn a workforce culture around and make it much easier to implement compliance programs across the workforce. 

Lifting employee engagement is likely to enhance your enterprise risk management strategy. If you’ve got low levels of satisfaction amongst your workforce then it’s time to start with the basics.

Recognition: Noticing and recognising people for the behaviours and output you want to see shows them that they’re valued and appreciated. Find ways to tell your employees about the impacts their individual contributions have on customers, other team members and the organisation. 

Work life balance: Ensure your people have the flexibility and balance that they’re looking for. Find ways of creating time for colleagues to connect, have a laugh and pursue wellness while they’re at work too.  

Align goals and aspirations: Create meaningful ways to support your employees’ goals and career ambitions. Giving people opportunities to work on new projects, take on new responsibilities or undertake training show that you take their aspirations seriously. Focusing only on organisational or team KPIs in performance meetings is a sure-fire way to get your employees to tune out.  

Balance: Find a way to balance staff KPIs and measures with compliance and conduct risk activity. When compliance is perceived as a blocker to achieving sales or service expectations (and the ability to earn sales or service rewards) engagement can really take a hit.  

How YakTrak supports employee engagement and workforce compliance 

YakTrak’s enterprise risk management platform can help on many levels. It helps to improve employee engagement by: 

• embedding consistent, meaningful coaching that employees can see value in 
• supporting employees to reach (organisational and their own) goals with tracked outcomes  
• ensuring clarity over conduct risk expectations and driving development activity around behaviour gaps.  

YakTrak also addresses some of the other barriers to improving workforce compliance. It can be used to: 

• digitise clunky manual compliance and audit processes 
• support the regular delivery of coaching for compliance  
• provide coaching remediation after a breach is reported to effectively change behaviours and support employees 
• manage a risk from the first moment it appears, through to follow up coaching, goal setting and reporting.  

YakTrak is a cloud-based enterprise risk management solution that keeps your data safe, is quick and easy to implement and won’t break the bank.  

Contact us and ask about a demo.

What is enterprise risk management software and how can it help? 

Enterprise risk management software helps your business manage a range of events that can impact a business’s operations and strategies. It supports your enterprise risk management approach to preventing financial, legal and reputational risk. 

The benefits of using enterprise risk management software to manage enterprise risk include improved monitoring of specific risks to your business, automating communications so everyone who needs to know about a breach does and tracking of remediation for auditing and compliance. Dashboards and automated reports should give your business the tools it needs to manage its risks.  

When considering enterprise risk management tools, think YakTrak.   

Get in touch today to find out how YakTrak can help you.