How do you improve compliance in your organization?

The biggest frustration for us compliance professionals?  Being ignored.  Our typical response?   YELL LOUDER and use threats like YOU ARE OUT OF COMPLIANCE! The biggest frustration for everyone else? Being YELLED AT and being told YOU ARE OUT OF COMPLIANCE!

Yelling creates high social stress levels in the person being yelled at.  As Jonathan Haidt highlights in The Anxious Generation (2024), high stress doesn’t lead to thoughtful compliance – it triggers a fight or flight response.  And that response impairs cognition.

As it turns out, there’s a graph for that:

(Courtesy of Wikimedia Foundation, “Yerkes-Dodson Law.”  Performance = compliance with a complex task, and arousal = stress level.)

The answer can’t be to snap people straight from low stress (impaired performance because they don’t care) to high stress (impaired performance because they’re freaked out).    I argue that “optimal” compliance requires effectively communicating the “Why,” “What,” and “How.”  We compliance folks are often good at explaining “what” but not “why” or “how.”  Robert Cialdini in Influence (1984) demonstrated that just inserting the word “because” in a request greatly increased compliance.   Telling people “how” to perform a task makes them better able to do it AND signals that you care enough to help.

What tools have you found that effectively increase compliance?

#compliance #complianceprofessional #behavioralpsychology #fear