“This book is not about using fancy new tools and approaches – there are plenty of vendors happy to take your call and tell you about their solutions if that is what you are looking for,” writes veteran compliance officer and author Mary Shirley in the introduction to her new book.

“It is about your everyday compliance practitioner without access to unlimited resources or unlimited budget and who possesses a typical compliance skill set, looking to make a difference and advance their program without overreliance on specialist, and oftentimes rather pricey, service providers.”

Whether you’re new to compliance, a senior practitioner, or a consultant advising compliance departments, Shirley’s helpful guidance, provided in her book Living Your Best Compliance Life: 65 Hacks and Cheat Codes to Level Up Your Compliance Program, comes in the form of incredibly creative ideas.

And they are creative. When you read them you think about how clever they are. More importantly they’re so doable, making you get started on them right away.

Living Your Best Compliance Life curates these actionable hacks and tips while honoring such incredibly important aspects of compliance that can get lost in the weeds, such as promoting psychological safety at work and galvanizing more cross-team collaboration and CEO engagement in compliance activities.

When it comes to providing employees psychological safety – or the feeling of being able to speak up, take risks, and make mistakes without fear of negative consequences – she offers some examples that are easy to adopt.

Shirley tells compliance practitioners that she offers the ideas so this community can “build the ship while sailing it, [and] strive for a better and more effective program while the field advances and morphs around us”.

Here’s one pro tip she offers regarding an important data point to measure: She advises keeping an eye on the number of hotline calls you have been getting and seeing if there is any change after you refresh your long-standing materials advertising its existence and access details. You just might see an uptick in calls after simply refreshing those hotline materials – like posters in the office space.

And when it comes to providing employees psychological safety – or the feeling of being able to speak up, take risks, and make mistakes without fear of negative consequences – she offers some examples that are easy to adopt, with some tweaks to how certain questions or statements are worded.

Besides being instantly helpful and relevant, though, another aspect you might enjoy (especially if you’ve been hanging around in the compliance community for a while) are her references to compliance professionals that you will recognize, and their insights and experiences punctuate the book nicely with their unique voices and backgrounds.

Mary Shirley’s book is available through Corporate Compliance Insights and may be purchased directly on Amazon.