Compliance or commitment

Com­pli­ance is a word that is overused. It’s found in organ­i­sa­tions all over the world. Man­agers expect staff to be com­pli­ant with cor­po­rate poli­cies. Com­pa­nies are required to be com­pli­ant with leg­is­la­tion and codes of prac­tice, and with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and a myr­iad of new reg­u­la­tion in other coun­tries, the word is thrown around more and more.

Per­haps, how­ever, com­pli­ance is not the best way for­ward. The word com­pli­ance implies a man­dated task – doing some­thing because that some­thing is required. It has an air of “sat­is­fac­tory” about it. You com­ply to the stan­dard because you must, not because of any under­ly­ing desire or moti­va­tion. That may be suit­able for reg­u­la­tory com­pli­ance, where let­ter of the law com­pli­ance elim­i­nates a cer­tain level of risk, and there are no rewards for exceed­ing that level. How­ever, when speak­ing about inter­nal com­pli­ance, it’s a dif­fer­ent matter.

Con­sider, for exam­ple, the “com­pli­ance” of employ­ees with inter­nal organ­i­sa­tional poli­cies. Inter­nally, there are very real ben­e­fits of employ­ees com­ply­ing with organ­i­sa­tional val­ues, poli­cies and codes. What if you could gain even more value, through employee com­mit­ment to those same policies?

Com­mit­ment takes your employee on a jour­ney from com­ply­ing with pol­icy to being truly com­mit­ted to it. In real terms that means peo­ple really liv­ing cor­po­rate val­ues, embody­ing your organ­i­sa­tional phi­los­o­phy, increased moti­va­tion, reten­tion and attrac­tion. The ben­e­fits are won­der­fully valu­able to organ­i­sa­tions of all sizes.