How do we avoid having to discuss low compliance rates in records with our organisations?

I feel like lots of us us work under an invisible guillotine.

It's the invisible guillotine caused by the fact that some day, someone in our reporting like is going to ask us what our compliance rate is, then they're going to ask us whether we know what we're doing, and what we've done with all the money that they've given us.

And we're an industry full of conscientious people, so regardless of the fact that we know the answers to that question, and they're good answers, we're going to feel about 4 inches tall answering them, and the anxiety and pain over the chance that they might get asked doesn't go away.

Where I think this becomes a real problem, is that it makes it really hard for us to have conversations about performance without emotion.

I know that I've lost my cool before when talking to people about what they're doing vs. what they should be doing, and it wasn't a good thing.

The end I think we need to get to, is the one in which we can have a conversation with all of the management stakeholders in our organisation about the performance of their teams - and talk about it like it's just a performance issue, not one in which we are supremely emotionally entangled.

"Hello, it's our weekly meeting again, your team handled 100 transactions last week and 10 of them made it into the records system, so you have a 10% compliance rate and you're tracking at the same for the year. What can we do about your teams' poor performance?"

Rather than the ranty screaming meeting we all probably want to have.

Personally, I think this is one of the areas where we need to start the conversation amongst practitioners first.

I go to meetings regularly, and I know that we're all in low compliance states - but everyone tiptoes around that. If we opened each meeting with "this is where we think we are," I think we'd all get a sense of the shared problem, and then we could find the isolated pockets of excellence and new ways of doing things, learn from them, and implement them in our own organisations.

Because ultimately, we can't avoid the conversation in our organisations, it's going to happen at some point. The only thing we have a choice about is whether we're seen as moving the needle in the right direction, and owning and managing the problem, or whether we're seen as someone who can't get it done and doesn't have a plan.