How to Measure Compliance With Company Policies and Procedures

In any organization, whether it’s a large corporation or a small family business, there are policies and procedures in place that employees must follow. These guidelines set the ground rules for everything from dress code to ethics. However, these rules are little more than words without employee compliance with company policies and procedures. When employees don’t follow these policies, it can lead to problems for everyone involved. But how do you know if your employees are following them? 

Why Measure Compliance 

Measuring your employees’ compliance with company policies and procedures is a vital part of your business, but why is it so important?  

• Identify areas of improvement: Without regularly measuring compliance levels, you risk getting complacent about your policies’ success or failure, which could lead to unexpected problems when they’re not followed. 
• Establish a baseline: Measuring compliance allows you to establish a baseline for future comparisons so that if there’s ever a change in policy or procedure, you can easily compare current results against past results to see how effective your changes have been. 
• Empower managers: Measuring compliance enables managers at all organizational levels—including first-line supervisors—to hold employees accountable for following policy requirements. 

How to Measure Compliance With Company Policies and Procedures

Test Policy Comprehension During Training

Employees often leave training without fully grasping what they’ve been taught and requiring more training later. Make it a standard practice to test employee understanding of the policies and procedures you’ve taught them before training is over. You can test at any time during the training session, but it’s best to do so at the beginning or end of each session so that you can address any issues that arise before moving forward with other topics in your presentation. 

Testing should occur again six months later (and then annually after that) so that changes in behavior don’t go unnoticed until they become significant problems for business operations. Testing employees regularly on policy knowledge helps identify what they may have forgotten over time and increases compliance with policies throughout your organization. Regular testing also gives employees an opportunity to refresh themselves on what they’ve learned.

Evaluate Misconduct Reporting Post-Training

Once you’ve completed your training campaign and observed the results, it’s time to evaluate whether misconduct reporting has been affected by the changes you’ve made. By comparing reporting metrics from before and after the training sessions, you can identify any fluctuations that have occurred. Fluctuations in misconduct reports can help identify areas where training can be improved and provide more clarity on which policies are working as intended and which ones need to be reviewed.

If there is an increase in misconduct after your training campaign, it could indicate that your lessons were ineffective or that they need improvement. The opposite could also be true: if there has been a decline in reports after a training campaign, it might indicate that employees comprehend company policies.

Use Surveys to Measure Employee Attitudes

Surveying employees is one of the most effective ways to understand how your compliance programs are working. We recommend conducting anonymous surveys at least once a year, asking employees about their compliance with policies and procedures and if they have observed misconduct. 

If your employees observe more misconduct than they report, it’s essential to identify why. Do employees not feel comfortable reporting non-compliance? Are they unfamiliar with the proper policies and procedures? Whatever the reason, a significant difference in observed misconduct versus reported misconduct is a sign you may need to reevaluate your compliance policies and procedures training.

Source Data From Other Departments

Not only your ethics department has access to data about employee compliance, so don’t limit yourself to people in that department when you’re seeking information. Departments like human resources, training, legal, or even benefits departments often record information regarding non-compliance and can be wellsprings of information regarding how employees are doing.

Once you’ve gathered all the relevant information from these other departments, look at it together and decide which policies have been particularly effective in encouraging compliance and which ones haven’t been as successful. This will help you develop future training programs and make improvements as needed–helping build a strong culture of compliance throughout your organization.  

Get Feedback from the Frontline

You can’t get a complete picture of compliance if you don’t include the people who are on the front lines. Managers and supervisors play an important role in helping you monitor compliance with policies and procedures because they’re responsible for employees on a day-to-day basis. Working with managers and supervisors will help you find trends in workplace behavior and uncover relevant information about your workplace culture.

Part of ensuring your managers and supervisors are doing their part to promote compliance with company policies and procedures is training them on handling compliance issues. If an employee reports non-compliance, managers should document it and ensure all relevant parties are informed when appropriate actions have been taken. In addition, if a manager learns about an issue from someone other than the employee who raised it, they need to ensure that their employees know they can come forward about compliance issues without fear of retribution or repercussions. 

Discover a Better Way to Measure Compliance with ComplianceBridge

Companies need to establish policies and procedures, but if they aren’t followed and enforced, they won’t help protect the company or ensure employees are doing their jobs safely and ethically. Compliance is integral to a company’s culture, but it can be challenging to measure. We understand that not every business is the same. With ComplianceBridge, you can build custom quizzes in seconds designed to test your employees’ understanding of policies and procedures. Because of our wide range of custom quiz options, the quizzes you create can be as simple or complex as you need, and the results can be viewed in real-time. 

We aren’t just here to help test your employees’ knowledge. ComplianceBridge provides a tailor-made solution to guide you through the entire process of creating, distributing, and tracking policies. With automated reminders, notifications, and reports, you will have better insight into your employee’s compliance with company policies and procedures. Get the tools you need with ComplianceBridge. Request a demo today!