How Creating a Culture of Compliance Leads to Trust

There are a lot of things employees want from their employer: a pleasant working environment, fair wages, flexibility to allow for work-life balance, opportunities for advancement. Business experts have been discussing ways to accommodate these needs for years, but in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, employees expect something else from their workplace: trust.

Having trust in your colleagues and your employer is vital to help you weather a crisis like the one we’ve all just endured – so it is disheartening to discover that, according to the Edelman “Trust Barometer” survey, one in three people don’t trust their employer.

If businesses want to retain employees and attract new talent in the post-COVID world, they will need to foster an environment of trust within their offices. But just how do you do that? According to the research, all signs point to one thing: developing a culture of compliance.

The Importance of Compliance in Creating Trust

Compliance has long been a high priority for businesses. After all, the risks of non-compliance – litigation, a hostile work environment, and a poor reputation in the industry, just to name a few – can be detrimental to your organization. But recent research shows that compliance also helps build a culture of trust in your workforce.

It is almost impossible to overstate the value of trust in your company. In an article in the Houston Business Journal titled, “The Power of Trust and How to Build it,” writer Danielle Allen states that “[c]ompanies with high employee trust levels outperform by 186 percent…those with low trust levels, according to the Gallup Organization.” Employees who trust their companies tend to be more engaged and more productive – which is critical for your bottom line, as employee disengagement costs businesses an estimated $450 to $550 billion annually!

Ignoring the value of trust can hold your business back in a major way. Therefore, it’s critical that businesses use every tool at their disposal to create a trustworthy working environment. One of the best ways to do this is to build a culture of compliance.

Compliance helps employees hold each other accountable (as well as their managers and higher ups), which can increase transparency and openness within an organization. This is very important for your business; in fact, a study from IBM reported that businesses who outperform in their industries are 30% more likely to promote transparency in their corporate culture.  

How to Create a Culture of Compliance

Transparency, accountability, and compliance are the keys to improving employee trust – and in this way, helping boost engagement and productivity for your business overall. But how can you create a culture of compliance for your business? The trick is to promote compliance among your employees from their very first day through training, and then to reward compliance continually through employee incentives.

Appropriate Training

Building a compliant culture within your company should start on day one for each new hire. Your training curriculum should clearly define what compliance means for your industry, as well as the policies your business has in place to ensure you meet those standards. If you have any kind of hotline for reporting compliance (and you should), make sure your employees know that it exists and understand how to use it.

Promoting compliance from the very beginning – particularly if you encourage your employees to report noncompliance – will help your employees understand that you hold compliance in high regard. This will help build trust between your employees and you because they will understand that you have their well-being in mind as well as the organization’s.

Employee Incentives

While effective training can be a great way to encourage compliance in the short term, we all know that eventually workers forget the specifics of their training. This is why it’s important to encourage compliance regularly – and one way to do that is through employee incentives.

Offer your employees incentives when they follow compliance policies during their daily work. Even small incentives can encourage your employees to keep compliance at the top of their minds and offering them demonstrates that your company truly values compliance and transparency. When employees know that you don’t just value compliance, but reward it, they’re more likely to trust your company!

If you want to build an environment where your employees trust you (and you should – remember, employee trust results in greater productivity by a HUGE margin), you must make compliance a top priority for your organization. Contact ComplianceLine today to see how our compliance solutions can help you achieve that important goal!