Work of Compliance Officer

I work as Compliance Officer. It is a position that is unknown to most Slovaks. To be honest, I didn’t know much about what that term meant until 2010 either. My working life was related to controlling and logistics. The offer to work in the Compliance department came unexpectedly and I was a little worried about this new area. But later I discovered that this work would not only broaden my horizons of knowledge, but can be interesting and sometimes even creative. One of the challenges was to bring Compliance to the attention of our employees.

Compliance is about rules and regulations. This may sound boring. Who likes to read some guidelines or processes? That’s why, at the beginning of my Compliance career, I was concerned about how to make these rules and guidelines more interesting and how to motivate employees to read at least some of our regulations. It was shortly before Christmas when I saw an Advent quiz in the media … and then I got the idea to organize a Compliance quiz for our employees. I prepared questions and several possible answers so that the correct answer could be found in our internal regulations or on the intranet. The employees received one question each day, and the next day they learned the correct answer. It was an intense two weeks when our company really lived in the world of Compliance. In the end, we drew a few winners from the correct answers, and they received small product rewards. But the biggest reward for me was the fact that I contributed a little to making Compliance not just a boring collection of regulations.

Zuzana Svrčeková
Compliance Officer, OSRAM, a.s.