With legislation that came into play in November, 2018, it’s important to note the most important aspect to your staff: a culture of compliance.
Nurture a Business Culture of Compliance
A culture of compliance is about accountability awareness as a core mindset for all your team members. Holding themselves, and one another accountable, helps maintain a consistency that protects your network, data and company reputation.
As the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s office has described to us at ActiveCo, a scenario as simple as someone from one department seeing private paperwork on a desk of another individual….that would be considered a potential security breach. Another would be writing down your password on a sticky note. Another is taking home a hard drive for a company backup, the potential for it to be lost or stolen is too great to be considered within compliance.
These changes may seem slight to some business owners but highly impactful to others. There is no organization too small or too big to avoid compliance requirements.
How to Establish the Culture:
Once your organization has an assigned Compliance & Security Officer (a requirement of the new regulations), it will be a large part of their duties to work with your HR department in ensuring the staff are educated from their first day on the job what your culture of compliance looks like and how they are expected to behave and maintain that strategy for their fellow team members.
How to Celebrate the Culture:
It’s great when your team members are able to hold one another accountable, helping to publicly maintain the proper procedures on a day-to-day basis. It is important that individuals are not made examples of or shamed. A culture of compliance means that everyone has the ability to “call each other out” but the company sets the tone of the dialogue. Clearly, most would agree a positive tone will work best.
The Role of the Compliance Officer:
Your compliance officer would be key in engaging the company with ongoing training, awareness of risks and reminders of “best practices”. At ActiveCo, we have helped our clients create an atmosphere of compliance.
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Related Article:
Why Canadian Businesses Cannot Ignore Compliance Legislation
