Oh, Human Resources. Of all of the strained relationships we see with our clients here at Spark Compliance, a Diligent brand, the most frequent foe is the HR team. Why? Well, here are just some of the pain points some people experience:
- They own the Learning Management System for training and don’t want to share.
- They don’t want compliance officers rooting around in their systems.
- They don’t want compliance adding questions to the engagement survey (makes it longer, don’t you know?).
- They are in charge of culture and values (at least in their mind).
- They don’t want to use the compliance case management system because it’s annoying and they are happy with their investigations, thank you very much.
It doesn’t have to be this bad. Yes, some people are inherently difficult, but there are ways to smooth the path. Here are four tried and true ways to improve the relationship with the HR team.
1. Define Roles and Responsibilities for Internal Investigations
Turf wars seem to develop out of nowhere during internal investigations. In the ugliest scenarios, HR and Compliance hide information from each other or perform investigations in silos, occasionally duplicating each other’s work. To avoid this from happening, it is best to define your roles and responsibilities for internal investigations before you engage in them. Decide where to keep documents, what templates will be used, and how to determine who will take the lead on the internal investigations at the outset so you don’t run into problems later.
What if you’ve never developed a protocol for internal investigations or tensions are already running high? No problem – set up a meeting to ask them how they think internal investigations will work best. By engaging them in the conversation, you can begin to build a rapport to make decisions together.
2. Agree on How to Share Exit Interview Data
I’ve worked with a number of compliance departments that never see the data from exit interviews. Not only is this information critical for taking the temperature of the culture in the organization, this data can provide invaluable assistance for understanding risk in the organization. Compliance will see exit interview data through a different lens than HR. Where HR might simply see bullying by a manager, compliance may see potential fraud, cover-up, conflicts of interest or broader culture issues which could implicate ethical failure by the manager.
Agree on how you will share exit interview data. Perhaps there are data privacy concerns, so you can get an anonymized version of the data? Maybe you can get a monthly report amalgamating the results? Perhaps HR can add you as a database user so you’re able to access the data without their direct involvement? Exit interview data is key, and you need to have it to do the best job you can in your role. (more information on using exit interview data can be found HERE)
3. Agree on the Separation of Issues to Handle
In most companies HR reviews HR issues, but it isn’t always clear where HR issues end and compliance issues begin. For instance, when a conflict of interest involves a romantic relationship between two co-workers, is that an HR issue or a compliance issue? What about a situation where a report of wage and hour violations includes a retaliation compliant in violation of the Code of Conduct?
Agreeing on the separation of issues beforehand will avoid problems when a large issue arises. Try to set up a protocol for determining which issue is the foremost issue if more than one issue is present or overlap occurs. By agreeing early, you’ll stop problems from occurring later.
4. Create a Close-Out Protocol for Whistle-Blower Complaints Relating to HR Issues (which is most of them!)
How many calls to your whistle-blower hotline relate to HR issues? All of them? If your company is like most companies, nearly all of the calls received by the whistle-blower hotline relate to HR issues. From reports of someone smoking in the bathroom to garden-variety I-hate-my-manager calls, the majority of whistle-blower complaints come in regarding HR issues.
If you’ve developed protocols for dealing with these issues, the next step is to ensure that you receive information on the disposition of these investigations and can validate that the complaint was properly investigated and closed-out.
With a little pre-planning, you can make the corporate schoolyard much more of a playground than a turf war.