3 steps to building in empathy to build out results

Empathy is a business imperative. It needs a real internal champion if your organization is going to meet new customer and colleague expectations. These three best practices can help you position the internal audit team to lead that charge now.

Empathy is no longer a nice to have. It’s a critical business imperative that may just define your future success. Why? What we’re experiencing today isn’t only an economic crisis, it’s a human one.

That singularly powerful social reality is driving new risks, and a need for new business solutions, models and controls grounded in empathy. That means there’s never been a better time to enable internal audit with the right seat at the strategic table, teeing this team up to support the social and technological changes impacting the business landscape right now. 

How can internal audit help build more empathetic organizations?

1. Get internal audit and HR working together

Culture is shifting from office to frontline, from policy to purpose. It’s no longer what we’re doing, but how we’re doing it, that’s driving culture and reinforcing your position as both employer and service provider of choice. What’s more, culture must now also span the virtual world. That means defining your digital-centric culture clearly, enabling transformative leadership to support it and using key metrics to measure and manage that change well. By working to build more empathy into the way you work, internal audit can provide robust assurance (especially in this ongoing work-from-home environment).

Empowering internal audit and others with training can help everyone cultivate the empathetic leadership model you need next. That means bringing internal audit into strategic conversations at the design phase to enable controls that are effective during execution.

Make progress by asking questions the following questions:

• Where are the opportunities to adapt the way we interact with and support our people?
• Are we defining our new digital culture clearly enough to cultivate and measure it?
• Where can we invite internal audit into the conversation sooner to help co-develop the approach?
• How do we need to adapt our benefits (mental wellness, health, etc.) to better meet people’s needs? How can internal audit help assess the risk?
• What kind of learning opportunities will help our people embrace empathetic leadership?
• How will we set tone from the top around empathy, and gauge the effectiveness of our approach?

2. Embed empathy into the entire internal audit process

The way internal audit works with colleagues internally impacts how you succeed as a team, and influences the kind of empathetic service you’ll offer your clients. From internal interactions to stakeholder conversations, empathy must become the connective thread in the audit lifecycle. Something as simple as asking auditees how the pandemic has affected their operations can set the tone. Offering new ways of providing evidence or extending timelines reinforces it.

Recognizing that people are living through a global crisis at every stage of the audit can propel a better audit. It also resets expectations for what your organizational culture should be, and how you should manage others – both internally and externally.

Make progress by asking questions like:

• How can we cement relationships to better the business for the long term?
• Where are our internal pain points and how do we eliminate them?
• Do we need more formal mentorship channels around empathy?
• Where do we traditionally find friction in the internal audit lifecycle, and how can we smooth those areas out with a more human touch?
• How can we shift perspectives and help other teams embrace internal audit as an ally to be included vs. a compliance box to be ticked?

3. Reinforce that what gets measured gets done

Digitally, businesses are creating and improving user experiences at a pace that makes it harder for controls to keep up. Socially, they’re adapting everything from offices to restaurants to navigate an intricate web of health guidelines while the population’s collective anxiety level skyrockets. Emotionally, people are working in a high-stakes environment to comprehend vulnerability in all its forms, from financial and digital to accessibility and health. Failing to understand the sheer volume of conditions your colleagues and clients are experiencing could mean the solutions you develop may not be empathetic enough to be effective. Empathy needs a strong platform both in the existing culture you’ve built, and the digital culture you’ll create next.

Establishing questions, criteria or surveys for audit teams to use sets a clear bar on expectations. Internal audit can play a role here as the team is well suited to provide pulse checks on culture by building in specific questions to assess different aspects of this crisis, even as you rebuild your operating models to put empathy first.

Make progress by asking:

• What does success for our colleagues and clients look like now?
• How can we assess the way people’s needs have changed?
• Who will pull the story from the data to create a strategic plan?
• How do we communicate this shift effectively with our people, and reinforce it?
• How will we measure the impact of change, and correct course if necessary?
• How will we evaluate whether we’re cultivating digital culture for our people in meaningful ways?

Empathy needs a champion in your organization

Internal audit is well positioned to help by evolving models, processes, solutions and controls in ways that prioritize empathy. But unlocking that potential comes down to how well you position this crucial function to contribute. Will you abandon outdated thinking that pegs internal audit as a compliance-only function? Or will you empower this team to bridge business transformation and control effectiveness in a new reality where empathy must come first?