Compliance officers have long known they have a difficult job that can be exceedingly stressful at times. Now they have empirical evidence.
A recent study by the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics has unearthed hard data on how stressful compliance and ethics jobs can be. Of nearly 1,000 compliance professionals surveyed by the SCCE, 58 percent say they often wake up in the middle of the night from job-induced stress, and a stunning 60 percent say they have considered leaving their job in the last 12 months due to the amount of stress.
“It is simply unacceptable,” says Roy Snell, chief executive officer of SCCE. “It is a job that has to be done, to find and fix the problems. That goes back to the job not [being] well understood by others.”
The top factors contributing to stress were figuring how to comply with new and changing laws and regulations (cited by 24 percent of respondents), preventing compliance and ethics violations (16 percent), and remediating compliance and ethics violations (14 percent). Other causes include stress related to finding compliance and ethics risks, detecting and investigating compliance and ethics violations, and more.
The findings certainly resonate with compliance executives. “I am not a stress-oriented person by nature so my stress level is normally pretty low, but the demands of the job of the compliance officer can be daunting at times,” says David Frishkorn, chief compliance officer at $1.6 billion Comverse Technologies.
Frishkorn points to the relentless global crackdown on corruption and bribery. “We often are the ones who have to be strong and ensure that no improper activities occur, even when it means slowing down the sales cycle so we can complete our due diligence or walking away from an important contract when the terms and conditions create red flags,” he says.
Art Weiss, chief ethics and compliance officer at building products manufacturer TAMKO, blames the ever-changing business and regulatory environments for high levels of stress. The fear, he says, is a change in regulation that you don't hear about. “Changes in regulations concern all of us. Frequently we are faced with different interpretations or a changing enforcement philosophy that creates confusion as to what is expected of us. You think you know what the rules are; but they sometimes change,” he says.
Compliance officers wear many hats within their organizations, says Marjorie Doyle, managing director of the Aegis Compliance and Ethics Center and a former CCO herself, and that juggling act isn't either. “You are part of the company and you are trying to gain the respect of your colleagues. At the same time, you dole out discipline and identify issues within the company. There is that sort of stress in the work of a compliance officer,” she says.
Doyle says that aside from doing their actual jobs, compliance officers also have the difficult task of securing respect for their position within the organization. “It's a relatively new position compared to general counsel, CEO, and others,” she says. “You are not just trying to establish the ethics and compliance program but at the same time, you are trying to gain a position in the company to make it happen.”
“You are part of the company and you are trying to gain the respect of your colleagues. At the same time, you dole out discipline and identify issues within the company. There is that sort of stress in the work of a compliance officer.”
— Marjorie Doyle,
Managing Director,
Aegis Compliance and Ethics Center
And don't forget the more pedestrian worries about budgets and resources. According to the survey, 29 percent of respondents say they have “nowhere near” enough funds to run effective compliance programs, while another 44 percent feel that they have “not quite enough” of a budget.
Other common causes of stress include lack of administrative support; company-wide budget cuts to save money but that also increase compliance risk; lack of understanding of the correlation between quality and compliance; and a focus on financial performance that eclipses all other initiatives without consideration of the consequences, says Shawn DeGroot, vice president of corporate responsibility at Regional Health, and also vice president at the Health Care Compliance Association, which co-sponsored the SCCE study.
Being the person who says no to other parts of the enterprise takes its toll: 58 percent of respondents felt that they are in an adversarial situation or isolated from colleagues in other departments. “My concerns are more for people who are new to the field and seasoned professionals, who feel isolated [organizationally or individually],” DeGroot says.
Compliance professionals seem to have the most trouble with the sales department—probably because sales executives want the freedom to do what they must to close a deal. “The sales people do not want any sort of confinement or leash on their sales activities,” Doyle says.
On the other hand, relations with the legal department scored highest in the SCCE survey, rating a 5 on a 1-to-5 scale. Not surprisingly, the other departments that work with compliance most often—human resources, internal audit, and health-and-safety departments—also scored well with compliance officers.
Stress Relievers
Frishkorn says that while tone from the top certainly helps the overall compliance environment within a company, the day-to-day relationships that compliance professionals have with other departments are what makes the workload more manageable and less stressful.
SIGNIFICANT STRESSORS
The chart below from the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics examines what types of issues are causing stress for compliance officers.
Source: Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics.
And given the variety of potential risks such as anti-competition, bribery, anti-trust, and others, compliance professionals have to adopt creative ways to relate to their peers in the sales department. “Try practicing scenarios with the sales people and explaining to them why they should or should not do certain things,” Doyle says.
Many compliance experts may preach the tone-at-the-top mantra to all when discussing ways to implement effective compliance programs. Weiss says that in his experience, as cliché as the phrase has become, it is still absolutely valid as a key to fostering a strong compliance environment.
“A lot of compliance officers struggle to attain a culture of ‘doing the right thing,'” he says. “Our senior management, including our CEO, frequently walks the floor of our manufacturing facilities to visit with employees. He is interested in what is on their minds. That's the way our culture is.” Weiss also claims that he does not share the same stress as many respondents have cited in the survey.
Setting a realistic expectation of your work environment may help to lower the stress level, too. As Frishkorn says, no compliance utopia exists where everyone does the right thing at all times. “A realistic expectation is that people will periodically do bad things or wrong things, and the ideal compliance situation will consist of a well-defined and well-executed response plan lead by HR, security, legal, compliance .and operations,” he says.
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