That’s Entertainment! A Policy Management + Workflow Automation Use Case
How does coupling workflow automation with policy management make it a lot easier for employees and organizations to get clarity on gifts and entertainment disclosures and exceptions?
When an employee attests to a code of conduct or a gifts-and-entertainment policy, there can be lots of gray areas and contextual nuance. What’s the value of the gift? Did it come from an organization that you have business with, or are currently in negotiations with on a contract? Was it timed to a particular event or time of year?
Consider: your CMO getting treated to a bottle of wine during the holidays is one thing. Having her accept a week-long tour of chateaus in the Bordeaux region courtesy of your ad agency is something else entirely.
The risks of entertainment and gifts
No aspect of organizational policy and compliance is more fraught with potential for negative outcomes as disclosure and exception practices around entertainment and gifts. If your employees give or accept inappropriate gifts, your organization can be exposed to serious regulatory or even criminal repercussions, not to mention potentially severe reputational damage to your brand.
Providing a simple, convenient way for your executives and staff to report on gifting and entertainment activities is key not just for mitigating these risks, but also for cultivating a healthy, open culture. Further, you get a flexible and modular single-vendor solution to handle all policy management, exceptions, and disclosure processes.
Rectify issues before they escalate
Most large organizations have policy management tools in place. However, conventional policy and procedure management solutions tend to concentrate narrowly on the management, distribution, and attestation of policies. While this set of capabilities can offer significant benefits, there are associated processes that many tools struggle to address – especially exceptions, disclosures, and other matters where context, nuance, and uncertainty come into play. Ideally, you’d want to have a policy management automation mechanism that both A) enables employees to disclose gifts, and B) enables the organization to stay in control of any potential policy violations and rectify issues before they can escalate.
This is exactly the approach we’re taking by coupling best-in-class policy management with comprehensive, feature-rich workflow automation and compliance tracking. By layering our workflow automation on top of our policy management solution, disclosing, managing, and tracking gift and entertainment activities become easier than ever before, and importantly, do so in a way that’s extensible throughout the entire organization.
Organizations adopting Mitratech’s workflow-oriented approach to policy management are seeing significant ROI through the automation of manual processes, including automated logging, and the processing and resolution of exceptions and disclosures.
Over time, these capabilities foster transparency around gifting and entertainment disclosures, contributing to a healthy organizational culture of compliance and ethics. Consider some of the top-level features and benefits:
Drive visibility and compliance
Over time, these capabilities foster transparency around gifting and entertainment disclosures, contributing to a healthy organizational culture of compliance and ethics. Consider some of the top-level features and benefits:
- With far better visibility into gift and entertainment disclosures throughout the organization, you are much better equipped to uncover risks and rectify issues before they can escalate.
- By tracking gift and entertainment activities in a central system, you gain the granularity to easily document compliance to regulators and authorities.
- Workflow automation capabilities make it easy to forward requests to stakeholders throughout the organization, whether that be an immediate manager, legal, accounting, the office of the CFO, etc.
- Adjustable approval/escalation thresholds speed the resolution of routine matters, and flag questionable situations for closer scrutiny.
- Reporting dashboard and analysis features make it possible to quickly uncover high-risk behaviors, trends or problem employees.
Clearly, by introducing workflow automation to policy management, Mitratech is providing a comprehensive new approach toward handling problematic exceptions and disclosures like gift and entertainment reporting. But the benefits don’t stop there.
Next week, we’ll take a look at how workflow automation is streamlining the process of flagging, documenting and resolving conflicts of interest.
