Communication and relationships is increasingly critical for compliance teams

Regardless of their industry or issue, speakers and attendees at Compliance Week’s Third-Party Risk Management Summit in Austin, Texas found that a consistent first step they all agreed on was increased communication outside their teams. For attendees from the tech sector, that meant connecting with typically siloed product teams. For others from finance, it was helping their peers understand fast-evolving regulatory changes. Attendees from manufacturing and retail companies discussed their responsibility to define standards for their industry.

Strong communication skills might seem obvious to some, they’re not typically top-of-mind topics when compliance professionals discuss issues such as cybersecurity, ethics or third-party risk management. But speakers and attendees at every recent Compliance Week event have agreed that they are critical. At CW’s National Conference in April, the discussions revolved around career advancement, new approaches to employee training, and even employee wellness. At CW’s Ethics & Compliance Summit in March, cross-company communication was a central theme when discussing the future of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Some attendees reported their compliance programs made headway with corporate peers by creating specialized training videos to underscore the importance of vendor management. Others have shared how their teams built relationships by regularly joining other team’s meetings, putting a face to their names, and answering questions in low-stakes situations. Some have even made inroads by getting to know leadership of groups like IT, HR, legal and operations on a personal level, so that when teams are thrown together on a project or emergency, they have shared understanding.

Attendees have added that a baseline understanding of what various teams are working on across a company can be particularly helpful during a new initiative, such as a first AI program. At that point, it’s much easier to nurture small-scale relationships into cross-team partnerships. 

During this week’s TPRM Summit, attendees discussed how they need to ask more questions of their vendors to ensure they aren’t somehow funding forced labor. They also agreed keynote speaker Vera Cherepanova, head of Boards of the Future, said that boards of directors need to resist the urge to recruit specialists from supply chains or technology into their ranks. Instead, she said, boards need to focus on analysis and connecting dots between decisions and outcomes.