The terms competence can be, and often are, confused. They are very different things but need to work together to create safe working environments.
Compliance is about meeting a set of requirements or standards often set or required by a governing body within an industry. Compliance, therefore, tends to focus on following standard operating procedures, processes, or policies. The objective is to reduce personal and business risks – personal risk to safety and business risk to reputation and fines for non – compliance. In certain cases, companies may lose their license to practice if their compliance regimes have been shown to be inadequate.
Actions to achieve compliance tend to focus on training, process development, audit and management reporting in order to ensure that the bases are covered, and the risks identified and mitigated. An individual employee can be shown to be compliant with certain requirements just as the company can be assessed as being compliant with industry requirements. Compliance can be viewed as meeting a set of minimum requirements, although companies that lead in this area will view compliance as much more than this. Companies need to develop and regularly review their processes and procedures, ensure these are regularly audited and build a culture of compliance. This includes consequences for non – compliance. Creating a culture of compliance, in most cases, takes the longest as culture change is not something that happens overnight. Leaders must walk the talk and demonstrate their absolute commitment.
So, who cares about compliance? Everyone should; however, the people impacted most are executives, operations and safety roles and the employees themselves. If you’re working in an unsafe environment, you will not be fully effective. So, various stakeholders are concerned about compliance management, with each approaching the topic from slightly different angles.
Competence is different. Competence tends to focus more on the individual and their ability to perform tasks to meet specific standards. Competence goes beyond minimum standards and is interested in the extent to which an individual can demonstrate expertise in their job. In some ways, competence is an aspirational concept. If you think of someone describing a colleague as competent – we all know what that means – they’re good at their job. In safety-critical roles, that includes being very good at adhering to safety standards.
Key stakeholders for competence include Human Resources, as they focus on skills development, customers who directly experience the impact of competent or less competent staff and individuals who are interested in developing their own skills and marketability. All things being equal, having a competent workforce means that a company will be more productive, effective, and profitable than competitors who lack a competent workforce or effective competency management system.
Competence can be improved through training however can also be developed through coaching, good management, regular feedback and on–the–job learning. Companies taking competence seriously are likely to have developed competence matrices for all key job roles and will have very clear role expectations and outcomes.
Technology also helps – the more employees are encouraged to learn and engage with learning, the more competent they’re likely to be. Having the correct compliance and competence systems can:
> Support these initiatives by reinforcing the right behaviours
>Enable individuals to identify their own gaps and take ownership of closing these
>Provide reports and insights on where there are gaps and risks so they can be addressed
>Support assessment and verification workflows, making audits much simpler and cost-effective
>Ensure that “knowledge fade” is detected and acted upon before it becomes a risk.
If you’re looking to improve your compliance and competence effectiveness, please get hold of us at Contact and we’ll be happy to talk you through our range of relevant solutions.