Getting audit ready is easy with the 5 'A' steps of knowledge, especially if you are proactive instead of reactive. Having these steps built into your compliance system ensures the right culture and readiness for any time.
Step 1 - Awareness
Step 2 - Accessible
Step 3 - Ask
Step 4 - Acknowledge
Step 5 - Awards
Step 1 Awareness - Make understanding the compliance benchmarks of regulation everyone in the organization's responsibility. There will be levels of responsibility however being aware of the full compliance requirements and then each person's specific role can help each team member find the beauty and freedom from knowing the requirements. Understanding and being aware can also remove the prickly uncomfortable feeling of ignorance and the well-known scared cultural stigma of 'compliance' and 'audit'. This also can align the timeframes, schedules, and key points of compliance evidence throughout the year.
Step 2 Accessible - Don't hold onto information in one section or level of responsibility. Let everyone know the targets, goals, and current status of compliance as a matter of everyday activities as well as short projects. A successful quality and compliance culture comes from ALL not just 1. This has to be more than just sharing information on a need-to-know basis or waiting on others to report. For example, the prickly2sweet system can be logged into at any time and all reports for all reviews are available. We can help you out there.
Step 3 Ask - Everyone in an organization should be encouraged to ask compliance questions, but also the specific compliance staff's main mission should be to ask everyone their ideas, feedback, questions on improvement. Make it anonymous if it increases the information sharing, make it fun, make it meaningful. Try innovative ways of asking like online surveys that are linked at the bottom of meeting minutes, or a monthly focus game for training on a compliance topic and include requests for areas of improvement or on a staff newsletter. Asking also encourages knowledge sharing and accessibility
Step 4 Acknowledge - Identify visibly how the organization is going. This can be done in so many innovative ways. Having a notice board, electronic or static, when people log on to your system or email or walk into the office. Use a system that is accessible to everyone at any time, easy to use, and read, and bonus points for those that are automatically updated when compliance-specific activities are completed. The goal here is not to make more goals up, more to align the organization's goals with compliance requirements so that you can acknowledge those achieving and reaching targets. When this is implemented the audit requests come you are already aware of what is being conducted, completed, and achieved. Make sure you keep your eyes out for our new dashbooard on Prickly2sweet coming soon.
Step 5 Awards - Celebration is so important in compliance achievement. Celebrate your wins and winners of compliance, throughout the year. Align the goals with business targets and you will see more people focus on these rather than other areas not intended. These awards can also be included in Step 3, ask what the team would like as an award for reaching or exceeding a goal.
If you would like a copy of this step-by-step guide and an easy to read info graph, email us at info@edcv.com.au or become a subscriber to our mailing group.