How to make compliance work for your team (not the other way around)
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How to make compliance work for your team (not the other way around)
Dimitris Sylligardakis
14 January 2025
7 min read
Dimitris Sylligardakis
14 January 2025
7 min read
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Why teams struggle with compliance
How to make compliance feel natural for your teams
Why user experience is the missing piece in compliance success
From hassle to habit: simplify compliance for trust and growth
Discover how to transform compliance from a checkbox exercise into an intuitive part of your team's daily workflow, and get our thoughts on how you can simplify your systems to make them work for your people—not against them.
While compliance is often painted as a technical or legal requirement, our recent webinar, Building a compliance culture: strategies for today's challenges, revealed a deeper truth.
At its core, compliance isn't about policies or checkboxes—it's about people and collaboration. It's a constant balancing act between effectively delivering your day-to-day work and meeting complex compliance standards on a daily basis.
This led me to ask: how can we transform compliance from a bureaucratic burden into an intuitive part of our whole team's daily work?
The answer lies not in more complex systems or stricter policies but in understanding how compliance affects everyday teams and designing solutions that work for people, not against them.
Why teams struggle with compliance (and what it costs them)
For many teams, compliance isn't something they think about until it lands directly in their laps. It's easy to view it as a distant responsibility handled by legal or IT—until a new regulation or audit brings it front and centre.
Take data management as an example. When a team suddenly needs to ensure compliance with laws like GDPR or CCPA, it often means navigating a maze of rules, systems, and processes. This disrupts workflows, adds stress, and creates confusion, especially when compliance tools aren't user-friendly or integrated into everyday tasks.
That's probably why 74% of organisations cite compliance as being a burden on their teams. But, compliance done right can empower teams, giving them confidence that they're working within safe and efficient systems.
How to make compliance feel natural for your teams
To make compliance easier, keep it simple. Teams shouldn't have to become experts in legal jargon or memorise complex protocols just to get their work done on time. Instead, compliance should be baked into their workflows in a way that feels seamless and intuitive.
Here are some tips for achieving that:
1. Automate the repetitive tasks
Manual compliance tasks, like verifying permissions or tracking data usage, are time-consuming and prone to error. Automation can take these tasks off your team's plate so they can focus on the work that matters most.
2. Communicate clearly and simply
Confusing instructions or overly technical language only create more problems. Compliance processes should be explained in plain language with clear steps, making it easy for teams that aren't well-versed in compliance and legal to understand what's expected of them.
3. Make your training quick and focused
Instead of overwhelming employees with hours-long training sessions, bite-sized modules that focus on practical, day-to-day actions can be far more effective. In our webinar, Nick Wade, Co-Founder and COO of Opus Guard emphasised this, saying, 'There's a lot to compliance, but taking the first steps first is really important to building a practice, real awareness in your business, and making sure that your employees are being trained.'
4. Provide easy access to compliance resources
Teams need a go-to place for compliance help, whether that's an internal Confluence page, a service desk, FAQs, or a dedicated support channel in Slack. Making access to compliance support easy will save time and reduce frustration around the topic, making your team more likely to engage positively with it.
Why user experience is the missing piece in compliance success
Too often, compliance solutions are designed with regulations in mind, not the people who use them.
Andy Barker of Fun Inc told us that building an effective compliance strategy comes down to three things: product, process and people. But, he added a critical detail: 'what I find brilliant is how many people forget the people part.’
Complex tools or rigid processes discourage adoption and lead to mistakes—not because people don't care, but because your systems don't work for those people inside your business.
Consider common scenarios like these… do they sound familiar?
- A marketer wants to send a customer survey. Their data compliance tool forces them to navigate through five different screens of legalese just to verify if their survey meets GDPR requirements. They end up clicking through the screens without fully understanding if they're compliant or not.
- A sales representative needs to share a contract with a prospect. The document management system's permissions and requests are so complex that they resort to sending files via email to speed up the process—creating exactly the kind of compliance risk the system was meant to prevent.
That's why user experience is so important in compliance. Your compliance tools should guide users through compliance requirements naturally, with features like clear, easily understandable language, simple navigation, and clear feedback on why something is or isn't compliant.
Let's take one of Upscale's apps as an example of how this could work in practice.
When organisations install our app, Encryption for Jira, the end-user—that is, everyone on a team that handles sensitive files in their daily work—doesn't need to change their behaviour.
Their Jira issues will function as they always have, but once the app is installed, everyone will have an extra way to secure information using encrypted custom fields, and their attachments will be automatically encrypted when uploaded.
These small but important design choices make compliance feel less like a chore and more like second nature.
From hassle to habit: how simplifying compliance builds trust and drives growth
Simplifying compliance isn't just about making life easier for teams. When teams have the tools and support they need to meet compliance requirements, they can work with confidence, innovate without fear, and focus on delivering value to customers.
When compliance becomes second nature rather than a burden, your team can truly innovate, grow, and deliver exceptional value—all while staying securely within the guardrails that protect your business and your customers.
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Written by
Dimitris Sylligardakis
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Upscale
Based in London with a few cats and a small passion for Python automation, gardening, history, and econometrics (don’t ask). Dimitrios has worked in marketing across multiple industries, with a constant focus on providing customers with the tools they need to solve their everyday problems.
InfoSec & Compliance
Atlassian
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