From Keith Read’s post on LinkedIn:
“What’s your ‘Cost of Compliance’ – what do you and your organisation spend on compliance per employee per annum?
In my experience, the vast majority of compliance officers just don’t know that figure, nor do they even consider it, but it can be a hugely useful and powerful measure
If their compliance officer doesn’t know, then boards certainly won’t know and so they invariably assume that ‘compliance is expensive’. Some members of one board that I worked with thought that compliance was costing their company more than ten times the real figure
Throw in ‘the business prevention department’ and all the other misplaced perceptions and ‘myths of compliance’, then it’s not perhaps surprising that compliance officers face real challenges in engaging with their boards – and that’s why there’s rarely a compliance event that doesn’t feature one (or more) sessions on ‘engaging with the board’
For one company that I worked with, their audited ‘Cost of Compliance’ figure was then £22 per employee per annum. Against that, it took literally moments to identify household-name companies and organisations that had been fined for compliance failures, and those single fines equated to anywhere between £1000 and £1600 per employee. Against those, spending £22 to get it right seems a pretty good deal. Presented to a board like that, take it from me, they will look at compliance in a completely different way”
At the conference, participants will experience an impactful exercise with conducting your own compliance shield, with a pre-printed diagram that Keith has prepared.
You can read more about presenting the benefits and costs of compliance and about the compliance shield in a book: ‘The Unconventional Compliance Officer’, written by Keith Read, Former Group Compliance & Ethics Director, British Telecom (BT) known as an impactful international speaker and trainer.
One additional way to present benefits earned by companies, which invest in building and managing effective compliance integrity program, is by looking at the Ethical Premium, a metrics developed by the Ethisphere Institute. Historical data show that World’s Most Ethical Companies create 8 to 12% or even more of greater economic returns, compared to the market.
See more about Ethical premium and what makes World’s Most Ethical Companies earn the title, here: https://worldsmostethicalcompanies.com/
