Joe Murphy (jemurphy5730@gmail.com) is a Senior Advisor at Compliance Strategists, SCCE’s Director of Public Policy, and Editor-in-Chief of CEP Magazine.

Have you heard? “Culture eats compliance for lunch.” The supposed point is that culture is what matters and all that compliance stuff does not. What is the relationship of culture to compliance? How does the atmosphere at a company affect the controls and management steps you need to use?

Culture describes the work environment and how things are done. You need to know the people you are working with, what drives them, what their histories are, and what matters to them. This environment is the culture. There are also subcultures throughout any organization, and as explained to me by an anthropologist, culture is naturally dynamic.