How do I stop spending so much time chasing people?
You reduce chasing by moving compliance work out of email and into a structured workflow. Each task should have an owner, due date, reminder, escalation path and evidence requirement. This makes accountability clear and lets you monitor progress without manually following up every person.
The detail
Compliance teams often spend too much time chasing people because the process depends on memory, goodwill and manual reminders.
You may be following up advisers for attestations, managers for incident updates, Responsible Managers for approvals, or staff for training records. The work itself may be simple, but the administration around it becomes exhausting.
The common problem is not that people are unwilling to help. It is that compliance tasks compete with client work, management priorities and daily operational pressure. If the task lives in an email, spreadsheet or meeting note, it is easy to miss.
This creates several risks. Deadlines slip. Evidence is incomplete. Issues remain open longer than they should. Compliance reporting becomes unreliable because the team is still waiting for updates. Over time, compliance becomes seen as a chasing function rather than a governance function.
Good compliance practice removes as much manual follow-up as possible. People should know what they need to do, when it is due, what evidence is required and what happens if the task is overdue.
For example, instead of emailing five advisers to complete an annual attestation, the better process is to issue the attestation through a controlled workflow, send automatic reminders, track completion and escalate non-completion to the relevant manager.
A better way to manage this
A better approach is to design compliance workflows that drive the follow-up for you.
Where configured, [complyᵉ] can help assign tasks, send reminders, monitor due dates, capture evidence and show overdue items in dashboards or reports. This reduces reliance on individual emails and gives compliance teams a clearer view of what is outstanding.
The goal is not to remove human judgement. It is to stop wasting time on avoidable administration so your team can focus on risk, oversight and improvement.
With a central workflow, you can quickly see who has completed their actions, who needs support and which items require escalation. This also creates a stronger audit trail because the follow-up process is recorded, not hidden in inboxes.
Practical guidance
- Assign every task to one named person. Avoid shared responsibility unless there is a clear accountable owner.
- Automate reminders for recurring tasks, attestations, reviews and evidence requests.
- Escalate overdue items through a defined process rather than relying on repeated informal follow-up.
- Standardise evidence requirements so people know what to upload or confirm before a task can be closed.
- Report outstanding items regularly so managers can support completion before deadlines become compliance issues.
Common mistakes
- Relying on email as the workflow. Email is useful for communication, but poor for tracking ownership, due dates and completion.
- Chasing without escalation. Repeated reminders lose impact if overdue tasks never reach the right manager.
- Assigning tasks to groups. A team inbox or department name makes accountability unclear.
- Closing tasks based on verbal updates. Without evidence, you may still need to reconstruct what happened later.
See how [complyᵉ] helps reduce manual follow-up and turn compliance chasing into visible, accountable workflows.
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