How to engage your people in your firm’s compliance programme

During the webinar, we looked at the challenges engaging staff in compliance and how firms can meet these, including making learning fun rather than boring, which is what some staff see it as!

It is important to recognise that if members of your firm’s senior management team don’t engage with staff, then staff won’t engage with them; leading by example is pivotal to creating an effective compliance culture.

A number of challenges can face senior managers, including taking a “tick-box” approach to compliance, failing to find time to deal with non-fee earning matters, failing to communicate.

The SRA Standards & Regulations provide clear direction on how you and your firm must deal with compliance, and detail the obligations your managers and employees must meet, for instance they must act in a way that upholds public trust and confidence and with honesty and integrity.

Failing to get staff to engage with compliance can lead to serious issues arising for you and your firm, including complaints, negligence claims, loss of clients, and loss of quality accreditations.

Engaging with your future employees should start long before they enter your offices to start work, with their capabilities and approaches to compliance being assessed during the recruitment phase of their selection, and their training in the firm’s compliance programme being part of the onboarding and induction processes.

Ensuring new staff are fully engaged once they start working for you is critical, as is ensuring existing members of staff are on board with your firm’s compliance programme. One of the questions asked during the webinar related to how you should engage with existing staff, especially those in more senior positions. In our view there are several things you need to do:

• Ensure all your staff are trained and competent to a level that is appropriate for their roles.
  
  
• Ensure your firm’s senior management team and compliance officers regularly communicate with all staff as and when appropriate about compliance (and other) matters.
  
  
• Ensure that all your staff are engaging with what your firm is looking to achieve; anyone who is not seen to be doing so will need to be consulted and reminded that they have a duty to comply with both their regulatory duties and what the firm has set out in its own policies and procedures; should there be continued resistance to what the firm expects then there will be no option but to invoke its disciplinary procedure.

• Engaging with compliance could be seen as playing a game of football, in that the whole team should be looking to achieve the same aim and anyone who fails to do so should either be trained to do better of transferred; you cannot allow individual players to “do their own thing”, otherwise the whole team may decide to do the same leading to the whole team falling apart!

During the current lockdown it is even more important to ensure staff are engaged with compliance and other aspects of your firm’s operations; if staff feel isolated not only will they lack engagement, but their mental health could also be affected.

Don’t take it for granted that if your staff have an issue they will take the initiative to contact you or a member of the senior management team to discuss it, but having an “open door” approach will always go a long way in showing they have nothing to fear by engaging with you.

We are committed to helping our customers in these difficult times and can provide various resources and services that can help you protect your firm, all of which can be accessed remotely, including:

• Compliance helpline
• Compliance webinars with Q&A sessions
• E-learning training library
• Learning management system (LMS)
• Risk & compliance system and advisory services
• Policies & precedents bank
• Adapting your law firm hub
  
  

Watch our recent webinar where we discussed the above in more details - how to engage your people in your firm's compliance programme.