Compliance for all: our challenge
In many ways, our
work as compliance management systems Standards writers and Certification's
bodies is easy: we risk very little and yet enjoy a position of strength
over those who offer up their activity to our judgment.
We prosper on
complex structured documents that are exciting to write… but not too much fun
to read!
The bitter truth is
that, in the grand scheme of things, the needs and expectations of an
average organization are probably more meaningful than our established formal
structured procedures, understandable by a few.
As early as 2011,
we, at EIFEC, introduced in our Standards the foundational principle of
justice for compliance: "Unicuique suum" (i.e. "to each its
own").
We did so with the
full belief that "although not everyone can become a great organization,
any organization can be grand in compliance": we never stopped
promoting it, using it, and challenging ourselves to put it into practice in
everything we do.
There are two main challenges
The first is
linguistic:
is it possible
to complement the Language of Standards with a new Standard's "Dialect"
and more understandable definitions?
The second is structural:
introducing new simplified procedures that can be easily used by ordinary
people.
For these reasons
given the non-ordinary context triggered by the epidemic we have created for both our International Standards (“Health Emergency Risk Compliance Management System” and “Compliance Management System for Sanitization Service Providers”) specific for epidemic context,
a simplified version for the benefit of all MSMEs (Micro, Small, Medium Enterprises).
We truly have to
risk something: innovating language and procedures to allow quick deployment of
the compliance through a more natural understanding, while safeguarding the
core values of auditing and management systems. The world is often
unkind to innovations: we do hope this will not be the case.