In a PwC survey, 64% of companies admit that the regulatory environment is the top barrier to reinvention, limiting their ability to deliver value. Another 85% report that compliance requirements are too complex to keep up with. Compounding these challenges, many governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) teams are overwhelmed by administrative friction in GRC, leaving little room for the most important compliance and risk management tasks.
Your work as a GRC professional involves offering foresight to help your organization identify emerging threats, define risk appetite, and weigh trade-offs. But when more effort goes to administrative work that adds little strategic value, managing risks and regulatory changes becomes reactive. So how do everyday processes quietly pull GRC teams away from managing risk?
Root Cause 1: Fragmented Tools Create Invisible Work
Most GRC teams use fragmented tools rather than a unified GRC system. In audit evidence collection alone, 92% of organizations report using three or more tools. If you also use different tools for other GRC work, such as policy management, management of internal policies, vendor assessments, internal controls and risk mitigation, the fragmentation creates a layer of invisible work and data security risks.
Your GRC team has to manually:
- Copy information from one system
- Import data into another system
- Validate the information over email, Slack or other channel
- Reformat the data for reporting and audit trails
What’s more, to keep things going, the team may build shadow workflows outside their official tools. They might use spreadsheets to bridge the disjointed system or turn inboxes into a task management platform. And every workaround carries real consequences.
Increased Opportunity for Error
Each manual handoff introduces opportunities for errors and inconsistencies. Disconnected systems make it harder to maintain a single source of truth across compliance standards. PwC reports that 70% of executives in North America admit that disaggregated data across the organization makes compliance even more difficult.
Delayed Insight
When you must gather and reconcile data before you can analyze it, insight generation slows. By the time you spot operational risk, cyber risk, and other issues at an aggregated level, the window to take timely action on risk and compliance management might have already passed.
GRC Teams Become System Maintainers
Fragmentation forces your GRC team members to spend more time maintaining systems instead of analyzing risk trends and advising your organization. They must update fields and respond to status questions in real time. As this progresses, more of their role quietly shifts from risk assessment to system maintenance.
Root Cause 2: Manual Processes That Don’t Scale
Over half of companies (54%) spend more than five hours each week on manual compliance work. Although you might have the right tools, much of the work between them can still be manual. For instance, after a team member completes a risk assessment with one tool, they might need to export and share the results as spreadsheets. Alternatively, control attestation might rely on email reminders rather than embedded workflows that support internal audits.
And manual workflows persist because they feel familiar and flexible. For a small team, these methods can work well enough to handle a limited scope. But growth changes everything. As your organization continues to adopt innovative technology and regulatory requirements and risks expand, including evolving cyber threats and exposure to data breaches, what once felt manageable quickly turns chaotic.
Unstructured Processes Become the Silent Killer of Growth
Manual processes lock your company into a fragile system. If a key team member is out, your operation slows to a crawl. When a new hire joins, they may experience inconsistent onboarding. And if a GRC leader wants to make data-driven decisions, the insights needed to guide organizational resilience are buried within disconnected platforms.
Root Cause 3: Poor Visibility Forces Constant Status Chasing
Traditional GRC programs were designed for a slower world. The periodic updates limit visibility, as you and stakeholders can’t get real-time insights into:
- Who owns which controls
- Where assessments currently stand
- Which issues or exceptions remain open
You might have the information, but it’s scattered across the organization, making it difficult to see the full risk and compliance picture at any given moment or understand the organization’s true security posture. So GRC professionals have to conduct daily follow-ups with control owners and colleagues to do their jobs.
Lack of Real-Time Insights Creates Trust Gaps With Leadership
Leadership expects certainty and timely answers about risk exposure, especially during audits, regulatory scrutiny or data breaches. But when you don’t have real-time visibility, you can only provide snapshots based on the most recent information you’ve collected. For the most part, this information will already be outdated by the time you compile it. Such outdated snapshots can undermine stakeholder trust, even if your team is working diligently behind the scenes.
Reactive Work Becomes the Default Operating Model
If your team doesn’t have real-time insight, GRC work will shift to reactive mode because:
- Business leaders and stakeholders can make unplanned requests for updates that aren’t readily available, forcing you to disrupt your team’s priorities.
- Reporting deadlines will always force your team to work last-minute, as they can’t see real-time risk and compliance status until they gather it manually.
- Your team must repeatedly validate and reconcile data before sharing it, slowing response time.
- Reporting focuses on explaining the current status instead of surfacing trends or emerging risks.
Why the Busy Work Problem Persists and Is Rarely Addressed
Even when your team works diligently, the shift away from risk management tends to persist. Here are some systemic factors that keep teams trapped in busy work.
Measuring GRC Success by Completion, Not Insight
If your organization only tracks tasks that the GRC team finishes as a measure of success, it’s easy to encourage busy work. While tasks such as control attestation and assessment are important, organizations should recognize the role of analysis and foresight in risk and compliance management.
Adopting Technology Focused on Compliance, Not Risk
Businesses often adopt tools to support audit and reporting requirements, overlooking risk management software that enables continuous visibility or decision-making. So risk and compliance teams spend more time documenting because available GRC software doesn’t support predictive intelligence and strategic decision-making.
Treating Risk Management as Documentation
When business leadership equates GRC with regulatory filings or evidence collection, your team can focus more on documentation. Thinking about risk takes a back seat to form-filling and administrative follow-ups.
How To Shift GRC Back to Risk Management
To reduce busywork and shift the focus back to the important part of the job, try reframing the GRC work around risk management. Here are some quick steps you can take:
- Design GRC workflows around risk signals instead of task completion, so attention is directed to emerging issues rather than static checklists
- Make ownership and accountability explicit by assigning risk champions across the organization, so progress doesn’t depend on repeated follow-ups
- Build continuous viability into your governance frameworks to eliminate the need for manual status updates
- Include insights and decision impact in your success metrics so GRC team members don’t only focus on documentation completion
- Reduce manual handoff through integrated systems and GRC automation to cut the time spent on workflow coordination and increase the time spent on analysis
Reduce Busy Work and Improve Strategic Impact
At Onspring, we offer GRC software to reduce busywork and help your team regain focus on risk management. You get automated dashboards so every stakeholder can see risk exposure and track progress in real time, without burdening your GRC professionals with data compilation and reconciliation.
Even more, you get clearer visibility and structured workflows, so your risk and compliance team will spend less time bridging fragmented tools and more time on managing risk and regulatory changes across the entire GRC strategy. Download our ebook Doing More with Less in GRC today to learn more about how to make your GRC program deliver insight at the speed your organization requires.
