The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #82
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- Read and Sign on Steroids: How to Make Compliance Smarter
- Compliance Overreaction: How Common Sense Gets Lost in Corporate Gift Rules
Please reach out if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon 👋
Tom
LIFE HACKS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Read and Sign on Steroids: How to Make Compliance Smarter
Read and sign is not compliance. But it’s a start. In the end, it means keeping teams updated, meeting regulations, and impressing auditors.
Can you confirm you have read the new guidelines on expenses?”
“As a supplier, you need to disclose your internal AI guidelines, including read&sign reports of your team.”
“Before the start of each shift, I need to be sure that all team members on the shift have read and signed all new ops infos relevant for their job.”
“The auditor wants to know that we covered all the ISO norms’ paragraphs in our quality management documentation.”
Sounds familiar? I’m sure it does. Compliance is omnipresent nowadays, regardless of the size of your organization. If you’re operating in a regulated industry or even in a public sector organization, compliance sometimes goes over the top. But irrespective of your personal taste, compliance is a fact nowadays.
What can you do? Let’s examine two different aspects of compliance and how to address them effectively.
End-User Compliance
The Paper Days
In the good old paper days, “read&sign” was the way to make sure everybody read the relevant documents. During my university days some 25 years ago, I worked as a ground handler at the local airport. Whenever I reported for a shift, I had to read through the new sheets in the ops info folder and sign the confirmation sheet. In this way, I confirmed to my employer that I had read all the ops info.
That was “read&sign” in its true sense. Read a piece of paper, then sign a confirmation sheet.
The PDF Days
With the shift to electronic documentation that followed from 2010 onwards, read&sign shifted from the briefing room folder to personal inboxes:
Dear Tom, please find attached the new version of our handling regulations for all our airline customers in the attached 946-page PDF file. It’s of utmost importance that you follow these new instructions with immediate effect in your daily work. Please acknowledge that you have read the document by replying to this email no later than tonight, 23:59. Best regards, The Management.
PDF documents made it possible to distribute vast amounts of information almost free of charge, but the sheer volume of information overloaded end-users. Read&sign, now called end-user compliance, became a farce for management to cover their backs.
Sending PDF instructions to your workforce has another problem. People will mark important passages in the document and save a copy of the document to their desktop. When you send them a new version of the same document later, you can’t be sure if they replaced that old version on their desktop. Even if they claim that they have read and signed the new document version.
What can you do?
My suggestion is to use a truly electronic read&sign solution where your team can read documents directly in the read&sign application rather than in emails. By doing so, you can achieve multiple benefits at the same time:
- You can be sure that your team always has the latest version of a document available. Operating on an outdated version that was saved to a team member’s desktop is then a thing of the past.
- Your team cannot just access your documents on their desktops or in their email inbox, but through a mobile application when they’re on the go. This will increase the readership of your documents for all your non-office team members. Think assembly lines, maintenance personnel, and the like.
- You can track read&sign through a compliance report directly in the application, neatly ordered by teams. That’s much easier than receiving dozens of emails from your team members, saying that they have read the documents.
PDF documents are a good tool to communicate simple and short internal guidelines, work instructions, and processes. However, if you have long and complex technical documents such as a 4000-page Airbus manual, a more structured format such as XML might be more suitable. But that’s a story for another day.
Regulatory Compliance
End-user compliance is just one part of the equation. If you do it, you can show your auditor that you kept your team well-informed, and who has read the updates when. But how would you prove to your auditor that your internal guidelines, work instructions, and processes comply with all the relevant norms, laws, and standards?
That’s where regulation compliance enters the scene. And that’s when the PDF is the wrong tool. Let’s dig a little deeper here.
Normative References
Do you know what the term “normative reference” means? Most people don’t, and they can’t be blamed for it.
A normative reference is a reference to a paragraph in a norm or a standard, which you can use in your documentation to show that you implemented all the requirements in the corresponding norm or standard paragraph. So in essence, a normative reference is a link between your internal documentation and a paragraph in a norm, law, or standard.
Typically, normative references are placed directly in the text of the internal documentation, for all the readers to be visible.
In the ISO 9001/27001 world, normative references have simple formats such as “4.2”, “A.12” or the like.
In aviation, normative references can be much more complicated, looking anything like “ORO.GEN.200” or “ORO.FTL.120”.
And now, because people don’t have the right tools, they stick those normative references all over your documentation, just to be sure to be prepared for an audit.
But 99% of your team looks at those normative references with puzzled faces. That’s because normative references only matter to your compliance and quality teams.
Make It Actionable
Don’t think of your internal documents as single documents, but as a collection of individual modules or blocks. Now, you can start linking each block to any other block — irrespective of whether this is a link within your documentation, or if this is a link to a paragraph in a norm, law, or standard.
The nice thing about software is that you don’t have to show the link to everyone if it doesn’t apply to everyone. You just show it to the people in charge of regulatory compliance.
And when you have a link between the relevant normative reference and your internal documentation, you can make that link actionable: Whenever the normative reference is updated, you get an automated change request to update your internal documentation. No more findings in audits that you didn’t implement the latest changes in regulations.
Reporting
How can you know if you’ve covered all the relevant normative references? A link report can answer the following questions:
- “For a certain norm or standard, show me in which document I can find all the normative references.”
In this way, you can easily find out if you missed one single normative reference in your documentation, or if a new version of a norm or standard has received additional normative references.
- “For a certain document of my documentation, show me all the normative references I am referring to.”
In this way, you find out immediately which norms or standards govern your internal documentation.
Your auditor will be impressed.
Conclusion
In today’s world, compliance is a given. At times, it can feel overwhelming, especially if you operate in a highly regulated industry or in the public sector.
However, there is a pragmatic way: Address compliance step-by-step. Identify your biggest pain point and solve this first. Is it end-user compliance or regulatory compliance? Then, only address the second-biggest pain point once you have solved the biggest pain point.
This step-by-step approach has only one caveat: When you choose a software tool for your compliance needs, make sure it’s capable of handling both end-user compliance and regulatory compliance. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck after the first step.
INSPIRATION FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Compliance Overreaction: How Common Sense Gets Lost in Corporate Gift Rules
Compliance overreaction is killing common sense in corporate gift-giving. Here is an example how rules meant to prevent bribery harm relations
Recently, I heard a story about a small professional gift that had to be returned due to compliance rules.
Somebody gave a presentation about his company’s activities, followed by a tour of the company’s facilities. The presentation and tour were offered to colleagues from another organization operating in the same industry.
At the end, the tour guide was offered a small present – a plaque and a small food basket. Everybody clapped, and kind words and thanks were exchanged.
End of the story? Not at all.
In the heat of the battle, the tour guide accepted the present. But after the event, he wasn’t sure if his company’s compliance rules would have allowed him to take the present.
So, he wrote to the compliance office about the case, only to be instructed to return the present and send the compliance office a written confirmation that the present has been taken back.
Seriously. We’re talking about a plaque and a small food basket here, not an exclusive sailboat trip off the coast of Abu Dhabi. That’s how far compliance has come.
To understand this craziness, let’s dive into the history of presents.
The History of Private Gifts
The practice of giving gifts is as old as humanity itself. Archaeologists and anthropologists believe early humans exchanged items such as food, tools, or ornaments, not only for survival but also to form bonds of trust. A simple flint knife or piece of meat could carry a deeper message: I value you, and I want you in my circle.
As civilizations developed, gift-giving took on layers of ritual and symbolism. In ancient Egypt, people brought offerings to pharaohs as signs of loyalty. In China, gift-giving belonged to the rules of proper conduct, emphasizing reciprocity and respect. In Rome, good luck tokens exchanged at New Year became a popular custom, blurring the line between superstition and social obligation. Indigenous cultures across the world often turned gifts into displays of prestige, where leaders gave away or even destroyed wealth to show power and generosity.
Over time, gift-giving in private life became more personal and sentimental. The 18th and 19th centuries saw the rise of birthdays, anniversaries, and romantic exchanges, especially among Europe’s growing middle classes. By the 20th century, holidays like Christmas and Valentine’s Day had been commercialized, with advertising industries ensuring that private gift-giving became not only a heartfelt gesture but also a global business.
The History of Professional Gifts
While personal gifts grew out of intimacy and ritual, professional gift-giving evolved as a tool of influence and obligation. In feudal Europe, lords granted land, titles, or treasures to vassals in exchange for loyalty and service. In return, vassals might bring offerings to their rulers to show allegiance. Gifts at royal courts became an important way to win favor or climb the social ladder.
Merchants and guild members also relied on gifts. A sample of goods or a generous favor could cement business partnerships and create trust in long-distance trade. Gift exchanges here weren’t about love or celebration—they were about securing future obligations.
The industrial age continued this trend in new forms. Factory owners and business leaders gave workers holiday gifts—often in kind, like turkeys or food baskets—as a paternalistic gesture of goodwill that also reinforced the power imbalance between employer and employee. In the corporate world of the 20th century, branded pens, gold watches, and luxury dinners became common tools for maintaining client relationships and signaling prestige.
Professional Gifts Today: Enter Compliance
Today, anti-bribery regulations and compliance codes limit the value and frequency of corporate gifts. What once was considered a professional courtesy is now sometimes treated as an ethical risk. Instead of lavish tokens, companies lean toward symbolic gestures, modest branded items, or shared experiences like event invitations. The core purpose remains: gifts still serve as a bridge between business partners, but the boundaries are tighter than ever.
Conclusion
From prehistory to the present day, gift-giving has always been about more than the gift itself. Both in private and professional life, gifts symbolize relationships, create obligations, and reinforce social structures. The difference lies in intent: private gifts often come from affection, gratitude, or ritual, while professional gifts are tied to loyalty, influence, and reputation.
Yet across all contexts, one truth stands out: a gift is rarely “free.” It carries an emotional, social, or political expectation that binds giver and receiver together.
Now let’s return to the tour guide with the plaque and the small food basket. With the historical perspective of gifts, let’s ask a few questions to make sense of the compliance office’s decisions:
- Was the gift intended to build loyalty, wield influence, or bolster reputation?
- Was the gift just a ritual of courtesy?
If the answer to question 1) is “yes”, then compliance would be right to disallow the receipt of the present. However, if the answer to question 2) is “yes”, then compliance would be overreacting with their request to hand the present back.
From my experience as an entrepreneur, I value common sense. In my view, the plaque and the small food basket were a ritual present, without any deeper meaning. However, having to give back such a present destroys loyalty and reputation between the organizations rather than building it.
Well done, compliance team.
About Me
Growing a company 📈 in uncertain times 🔥🧨 is like running a marathon — it demands grit, strategy, and resilience.
As a tech entrepreneur 💻, active reserve officer 🪖, and father of three 👩👦👦, I share practical insights and write about entrepreneurship, leadership, and crisis management.
When I’m not solving problems, I recharge and find inspiration in the breathtaking mountains 🏔 around Zermatt 🇨🇭.
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