By Amber Dreyer, Chief Compliance Officer, Sondor Health Plans, Inc.
In my years in compliance, I’ve concluded that the best attribute for a compliance professional is to be a good listener. Most of the time, people want to tell you their problems – it’s therapeutic. I often end a one on one meeting with, “our therapy session is out of time.” It’s usually in those types of meetings that one can pick up on issues that need to be mitigated or organizational trends that need to be addressed.
It’s tempting for us compliance folks to dazzle you with our deep knowledge of requirements. The reality is that no one really cares how much we know until they need us to help them through one of their problems. So, you can usually save it for those situations.
I learned an appreciation for listening mid-career. One of the job duties that had the biggest impact on my path and my approach to compliance was annual sales agent training. The first lesson was that the last thing an insurance sales agents want to hear is how they should do their job. The next one is all the bad things that will happen if they don’t follow the letter of the law.
To give context to the timing of this training, federal regulators had just issued a slew of new requirements and guardrails for agents in order to address the years of bad habits that had taken root. The impact of the changes was as significant as requiring brand new attestations and as minor as not serving ‘meals’ at sales events. We learned that granola bars and coffee is not a meal but bagels, fruit, and muffin are a meal. So helpful.
My challenge was to train an external sales force on all these new changes so they would effectively stay out of trouble, and in turn, keep my health plan in compliance. I was fortunate to have a great working relationship with our sales management team, and they let me have 30 minutes of presentation time at upcoming, state-wide sales meetings. You better believe that my slide deck was so detailed and explained every single new thing the agents could or couldn’t do. I was prepared to explain it all. I wasn’t prepared for the reaction I received.
During breaks at these all-day meetings, I made myself available to answer questions about what I had presented. What I learned was that our best agents already spent over an hour explaining all the nuances of government healthcare programs to potential customers, and what I was suggesting was going to pile on significant time and effort. In the end, I was the one asking all the questions and listening to how insurance policies were sold to gain a better understanding of how the sales process really worked. What agents really needed was help implementing these changes so that being compliant was easier and built-in.
I took the next year to absorb that experience and take action. We did things like created easy to follow videos that agents could simply play at each of their meetings that covered all the new, mandatory content. We did other things like streamlined attestations and created simple checklists to help ensure nothing required was forgotten. The next year, I was happy to be invited back to the training sessions, but I had revamped all my content to focus on how to incorporate the requirements into their existing processes. After our second day, an agent had something to say to me, and I’ll never forget it. He said, “Miss, I have to tell you that I go to a lot of these meetings, and that’s the best compliance training I’ve heard.” Best. Compliment. Ever.
Ever since that experience, I endeavor to learn about my business partners and listen to their challenges and problems for a dual purpose. I want to be part of their solutions and I want to help them weave in compliance principles and controls to strengthen their resilience to regulatory scrutiny.
Not everyone is an open book, of course. Compliance professionals need to be curious and get really good at asking questions. Find out everything you can. Our colleagues do some really fascinating and challenging things, and the more we know about it, the better business partnerships will be.