The Pyramid of Compliance.

Most business initiatives need employee “buy in” to work and compliance is no exception. Automated systems can impose a degree of uniformity in enforcing initiatives, but where the rubber meets the road will always be where your workforce interacts with your systems. An employee that embraces your policies and procedures can be your best protection from threats like email borne malware, as well as assurance that your organization is complying with industry and regulatory mandates.

How do you focus your people on compliance? Here are five suggestions from Ernie Hardin, founder and owner of 443 Consulting, an information security and business continuity consultancy in North Bend, Wash.

1. Get’em at the Door

Probably the easiest worker to obtain buy-in from is the new hire. He or she is a clean slate without some of the baggage of existing workers. New hires are also eager to please their new employer so they’re more willing to accept your compliance rules.

What should be included in a new hire’s introduction to compliance? A message from your company’s CEO emphasizing the employee’s role in the security of the firm can be very valuable in attaching importance to compliance. Of course the nuts and bolts of external rules and regulations that your business has to comply with–HIPAA for medical facilities, for example, or Sarbanes-Oxley for publicly traded companies–need to be explained, as well as your firm’s appropriate use policy relating to email and Internet usage.

2. Get ‘em Where They Eat

“Brown Bag” training sessions can be a useful approach to getting current employees onboard with your compliance program. The key to making these successful, though, is to bait them with something that appeals to the worker’s self interest. Free lunches are hard to resist, but tailoring your message is important, too. For example, Hardin point out that a session could be structured around computer security at home–a topic  of some importance to most of your workers. Since good security practices at home would overlap good security practices at the office, the session would be killing two birds with one stone.

“Fortunately, this training also reinforces good security habits, which, in turn, employees tend to bring back to the work environment,” Hardin writes.

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