Tools for the job: stress busters
When I became CEO just over three years ago, the team already knew that we needed to leave traditional, process-driven, bureaucratic internal auditing in the past. We therefore introduced agile techniques and began to work more in collaboration with our customers, aiming to communicate results much faster and in more immediate ways. We knew that these changes would improve our performance and increase our impact with clients.
What we didn’t appreciate was that all these initiatives would also contribute to improving the team’s wellbeing.
With hindsight, the mental and emotional benefits seem obvious. Put simply, working more closely and collaboratively with clients not only helps them, but it makes our job less stressful, easier to do well and we get the rewards of seeing our work make a real difference in practice.
We were supported by the new three lines model which explicitly discusses collaboration, stating that “independence does not
mean isolation”. Internal auditors need to work with their customers as if we are delivering a joint project – together, we help organisations to succeed. We have found that more collaboration immediately reduces feelings of “them and us”, reducing stress on both sides.
The introduction of more remote working as a result of the pandemic has also helped. We have to be aware that it is not ideal for everyone, but, overall, the combination of more frequent communication and more remote working has improved staff wellbeing. I wouldn’t have predicted it, but I’ve seen our team’s emotions move from shock, fear and anxiety at the start of the pandemic to being more positive than ever now, because of the changes we have made.
One indicator of this is that we had the best ever feedback to our staff satisfaction survey in the past six months – 83 per cent of staff agreed or strongly agreed that agile had resulted in smoother audits.
Change has also bred change. People feel they have more power and freedom to innovate and alter things, and the disruption has challenged everyone to think about what we do and how and where we do it.
What has changed?
Introducing agile techniques led us to create small teams who work closely together on a specific audit, using stand-ups to keep everyone informed of progress. This increased collaboration and support within teams and reduced frustrating bottlenecks. It also means that people are now more likely to share and explore ideas as and when they occur.
In addition, team members are more focused on what other people think and on helping each other. There is a sense that we are all working together with the same goals, rather than trying to deal with our individual workloads for the next quarter.
New software supported our agile techniques and enabled results to be communicated with clients as we progressed through the audit. This means there are fewer surprises and fewer complex explanations. It has reduced stress on both sides and enabled conversations to be shorter and more constructive from the start.
In turn, reports are much shorter (one page), because we have already discussed most of the issues in advance. This means that they can be produced faster, while they are still relevant and fresh in manager’s minds. We often ignore the stress that comes from creating a long, in-depth report and then finding that no one reads it.
Moving our planning to a six-month rolling plan that is reviewed every quarter means that we no longer put pressure on ourselves about the percentage of the plan that is completed. We can now focus on the most important issues to be covered in the next quarter and don’t waste time auditing things that are not a priority. We can also spend more time focusing on progress and emerging risks, because we aren’t talking about what we haven’t done and explaining why we didn’t do it.
We must remember that we create the measures and processes we use. If they put us under unnecessary stress or make us do extra work to meet an irrelevant target, we should change them.
We’ve also stopped measuring our audits and our service in terms of the time they take. Instead, we’re focusing on what they achieve. This sounds obvious, but it involves adjusting the expectations of customers as well as the outlook of the internal audit teams.
The critical point has to be whether our customers are happy with the service they get for their money. If we can add more value without obsessing about logging the hours we’ve worked – and free up our internal auditors to focus on the things that really need their time when they need to – we take out a layer of bureaucracy and another meaningless measurement. In addition, it means that our team members have more control over their time and can prioritise their own work, which, again, reduces stress and increases their job satisfaction.
We’ve found that if you trust teams to do their work well and empower them to challenge how they do it, team members and customers benefit and the whole process becomes happier and more efficient. I now look back and wonder why we used to be so stressed.
David Hill is the CEO of SWAP Internal Audit Services.
This article was published in November 2022.