Reducing risk by making compliance personal

Compliance is essential in any organisation, but it has an image problem: most employees think it’s all about standards, policies, and regulations.

Our global pharmaceutical client wanted to change that by helping everyone understand their personal role in upholding company values and minimising risk.

This project demonstrates the value of Acteon's discovery work. A two-week period of confidential 1:1 research revealed that the obvious solution would probably have failed.

The problem: good intentions but no action

The client knew that employees cared deeply about shared values, but most people didn’t connect those values with ‘compliance’ or understand how the Compliance team could help uphold them.

Not enough people were asking the Compliance team for expert advice, even when they were facing a difficult decision. Often, Compliance only heard about a decision much later – potentially after it had become a problem.

The client already used mandatory training, but with no measurable goal beyond meeting audit requirements. They asked us to build on that and create an annual refresher to target a specific outcome: increasing the number of colleagues voluntarily choosing to get Compliance input, and getting them to do it earlier.

Discovery: finding out why people don’t act

We began with a short period of discovery work to understand what was getting in the way. This involved confidential, structured interviews with around 30 employees across the business, over a two-week period. We found people often:

• Didn’t know they were expected to ask Compliance for advice
• Didn’t recognise when they would need to do that, or why
• Saw Compliance as ‘The Department of No’

The fundamental problem was that talking to Compliance wasn’t part of people’s normal ways of working, and there was no perceived benefit to doing it People were much more likely to make decisions alone, or get advice from a close colleague.

People already knew the team existed, so that ruled out the obvious solution. More communications or training telling people to contact Compliance wouldn’t have worked. The real barrier was people’s habits.

What we recommended

We made a series of recommendations to the client that were specific to their business, people, and culture. The client adopted all of them, and they became the foundation of a new approach to training.

• Use mandatory training as more than just an audit requirement. Connect standards and regulations to shared values and culture, and target simple everyday actions that reduce risk.
  
  
• Stop treating the annual training as the whole programme. Make it part of a campaign by surrounding it with internal comms and practical decision-making support. Reach people through the year, closer to the moments when questions come up.
  
  
• Reposition the Compliance team in human terms: Not a faceless department that enforces rules, but a friendly team of individuals who help colleagues make good decisions. Create new training material and practical tools to support real conversations and get people talking about compliance in new, more positive ways.

What changed

The new programme enabled the client to fulfil their mandatory training requirements, on time, and without increasing their regular annual budget.

It also changed what people did. By targeting specific actions related to seeking advice we helped people understand how and where it applied to their everyday work. We used the discovery work to understand what helped and what got in the way to design a solution that landed first time.

The Compliance team reports that colleagues are now coming to them voluntarily, and earlier in their decision-making. This includes people from teams that had rarely been in touch before. Asking for advice has started to become a habit rather than an exception.

The team also describes how changing the way they talk about their work has made it easier to have positive conversations with people across the company. Those personal connections support good practice and effective compliance, and they make it more likely that someone raises a question while the answer can still change a decision.