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How to Lighten Your Compliance Management Workload

author Michael Berman
4 min read
Mar 4, 2021

Compliance management is a never-ending job. As soon as one regulation is implemented or training or testing is completed, another one immediately takes its place. 

It can be overwhelming, but there are ways to lighten your compliance management workload while still staying compliant and on task. Here are four tips. 

1. Identify the mental loads you carry and find a way to put them down.  

We all have projects that feel as though they are constantly hanging over our heads. It’s an invisible weight adding stress to our work lives.  

Psychologists call this work of constantly having to coordinate and remember activities as “mental load.” Mental load isn’t the weight of any single chore—it’s the collective burden of having to track so many pieces. (It’s a phenomenon often linked to parents, especially moms.) 

Related: What Is A Compliance Management System And Why Your FI Needs One

 Take some time to make a list of tasks, activities, and projects that feel like a constant source of worry. Maybe it’s repeatedly reminding employees to complete compliance training, meeting a deadline for reporting data, or worrying if the institution is up-to-date in remediating all outstanding findings. Maybe it’s all of them at once.  

Then go through each one and think about why it’s such a mental burden. You may find that it’s not the individual task that’s the problem—it’s having to manage so many of them. 

2. Create blueprints or workflows for repetitive activities.  

There’s a good chance that much of your mental load comprises repetitive compliance activities such as: 

      • Identifying applicable regulatory changes 
      • Drafting or updating policies and procedures in response to regulatory change 
      • Sharing policy and procedure updates with appropriate staff 
      • Confirming employee compliance training 
      • Tracking consumer complaints 
      • Testing regulatory compliance to ensure your compliance management system is working 
      • Reporting to the board and management 

Do you have workflows for accomplishing these tasks or do you approach them like a blank slate each time? If it’s the latter, creating a blueprint or workflow can lighten your mental load.  

Each of these tasks has repeatable steps. Think about implementing regulatory change. Each time a change needs to be implemented, it impacts a different department or business line and different staff, but the underlying process is the same, including identifying the rule, determining its impact to the institution, writing policies and procedures, etc.  

Related: 6 Essentials for Flawless Policy Management

Develop a task workflow—being sure to include who is responsible for each task and the expected deadline for completing the task—and make sure you have a way to integrate it into your compliance management system (CMS). Compliance management software that centralizes communication, provides oversight of task management, and creates an exam-ready audit trail can go a long way towards automating workflows and reducing your mental load. 

The next time a task comes along, you’ll know exactly what to do, when to do it, and who needs to help you. 

3. Some tasks are burdensome—but does it have to be? 

Not every project can be made simpler with a workflow. Some are just heavy lifts no matter how you look at it. The question is: Should you be the one doing the lifting? 

As a compliance professional, you are highly trained and have the expertise that no one else in the institution shares. You can provide insights into strategic planning, offering advice on how to avoid compliance pitfalls when considering new products, services, and initiatives. You can conduct compliance testing to ensure policies and procedures are being followed and that controls to mitigate compliance risk are effective. You can think creatively to implement new regulations in a way that works best for your institution’s size, complexity, and product mix.  

That can be hard to do if you’re overwhelmed with day-to-day compliance tasks that don’t require your specialized institutional knowledge. Think about tasks that require compliance expertise, but not your in-depth knowledge of your institution. For example, many compliance professionals spend hours reading and interpreting pages of new regulations. In periods of significant regulatory change, reading regulations is basically a full-time job, but it doesn’t need to be.  

Tracking regulatory change is the type of task that can be cost-effectively outsourced to knowledgeable regulatory counsel. Even better, there is CMS software overseen by regulatory counsel that automatically identifies and alerts you to applicable regulatory changes and provides an action plan for implementation. It’s a huge time saver.   

Related: How One Credit Union Cut Compliance Research Time in Half 

4. Improve collaboration. 

Compliance is a single department, but your work touches every department, so it’s important to be able to easily communicate and collaborate. Tracking policy changes and approvals is exhausting when it involves hunting down the latest version of the policy and documenting that it was approved by individual board members or management. It’s not a good use of your time. 

Instead of trying to find ways to politely hound board members and management to review your documents, consider introducing an automated compliance management system that comes with a central repository for compliance documentation, allowing you to track policy updates and approvals. It also makes it easy for everyone at your institution to find policies when they need them, allowing staff to self-serve instead of taking up your time.  

Related: Advanced Data And Ncontracts Develop Strategic Partnership

While a compliance officer’s work is never done, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Take the time to consider your mental load and how you can reduce it. It may be easier than you think. 

Want more career advice? Here are 11 Can’t-Miss Compliance Management Tips From Top Compliance Officers.  

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