Building a Strong Insurance Compliance Culture: 3 Golden Rules for Companies
Having a strong compliance culture is essential for insurance companies. Without a compliance culture, companies may engage in risky practices that could result in severe consequences such as lawsuits, fines, and reputational damage.
In this article, you will discover the 3 golden rules that will help your organization to create a strong compliance culture, ensuring all employees understand and adhere to compliance regulations, ultimately leading to a successful and trustworthy insurance company.
How to create a Compliance Culture
Since compliance is such a big task, it is better to count on everyone’s collaboration. The more people know what to do about insurance compliance, the better. That saves time now and headaches in the future.
By the same token, it’s important to highlight that compliance isn’t just about filling out documents. It involves the whole organization. From personal passwords to regulatory W-9 Insurance Forms, compliance management affects everyone knowing their role in the organization and being compliant.
In other words, Compliance Management also involves abiding by the law, industry regulations, and other regulations that govern its operations. This is where compliance training and education programs can help employees understand these responsibilities and how to fulfill them.
So, not only must your company abide by requirements, but you must also educate your employees about their role in the organization’s general compliance.
In order to create a compliance culture and improve compliance management efficiency, here are what we consider to be 3 golden rules:
1. Keep Investing in Compliance
This may sound counterintuitive, but “you have to spend money to make money,” as the adage goes. By investing in compliance, you make money because:
- Complying with the law avoids lawsuits.
- You avoid confusion that causes time-wasting management errors.
Keep in mind that when a department owns compliance, everyone has a place to ask questions and double-check their work about this aspect. An organization or department that owns and manages compliance management would help create a culture of compliance.
2. Address Cyber Security as part of the Compliance Culture
Cyber-attacks are a growing threat in every industry, particularly in insurance, where health record data is the norm. In particular, financial documents and personal information are highly sensitive to cybersecurity breaches, since compliance mishaps can have a catastrophic impact on a company’s reputation.
Educating your teams on the importance of preserving security in their computers and internet use is just a part of compliance. Protecting internal networks, mounting firewalls, and keeping all client records are some of the most tasks for compliance inspectors.
Making compliance more effective relates to cybersecurity, where more knowledge and better preparation against threats avoid overly complicated solutions, overly reductive explanations, and employees putting serious assets at risk.
3. Monitor, Tweak, and Automate
Compliance management is also about updating and being on the lookout for everything new. This means new regulations, risks, threats, and changing company environments. Compliance officers, compliance managers, and teams should be monitoring and tweaking said compliance management program to make it more efficient regularly. Moreover, they should also look at automation capabilities and implement them when available and suitable.
Compliance management software makes compliance culture easier
After you have considered investing in compliance and started giving employees empowerment and knowledge, it’s imperative only to look forward. This does not mean discarding anything that happened before, but that you don’t look backward with your compliance. Once you’ve found your footing go on from there. Fix any compliance issues that you may have, move forward, and always keep advancing.
With this objective in mind, compliance culture can be improved most effectively by implementing compliance software. Because software keeps compliance in check, it allows the user to focus on more pressing issues. Therefore, each department can focus on its own contributions to compliance.
Learn more about how to improve compliance across your business with SmartCompliance.
