I often ponder the question, how do we get people to follow the rules? I see this type of challenge in both my work as an accountant and when I am doing governance training. This tip is the third in a series that will address the question, how we get compliance with the rules? I have created a checklist that spells Comply and today I will talk about what makes up the M.
C= communicate
O= observe
M= measure
How can we measure whether or not our stakeholders are following the rules? Pick a board policy such as, all board members must attend all meetings. We can measure this by taking attendance at each meeting and tracking attendance by board member. Once we have a measurement, we can determine if we have any areas of non-compliance. That is an easy policy.
What about conflict of interest? How do we measure if a board member is in a conflict situation? This is a trickier thing to do as we have to figure out all the possibilities and see if we can get the information. Do we ask board members to disclose all of their business interests and the names of their immediate family? We would do this if we are serious about getting compliance with our conflict of interest policy?
Organizations need to consider each of their policies and see how they are: communicating the policy, if they are observing the behaviour of the stakeholders and how they are measuring the results.
Stay tuned for the rest of the acronym.
No comments yet.