Five things that make compliance audits (more) enjoyable

There's a basic psychology behind why most people don't like audits. We enjoy things we understand, things we feel capable of, and things where the effort produces something worth having. Compliance audits, as they're often run, get in the way of all three. They feel opaque, the bar feels arbitrary, and the outcome can feel like a certificate for its own sake.

And yet, over the years, I've had clients tell me they liked their audit. Some said they loved it. Some looked forward to the next one. Many more, who wouldn't go quite that far, said that even though it was painful at times, they valued what they went through and what came out the other side.

So this isn't a post about making audits painless. It's about the practical things that, in my experience, turn an audit from a chore you endure into a process that makes sense, feels achievable and is worth the effort.

1. Start with the right mindset

Like most things, how you approach an audit largely determines how you experience it, and it's the fastest way past the psychology above.

Nobody does a compliance audit for its own sake. You do it because it produces a valuable asset: a report or certificate that lets you sell to customers who need it. Beyond that, some companies see the chance to lift their security, tighten how they operate, build the due diligence muscle that makes enterprise deals move faster, or simply put structure and foundations under a company they want to scale.

When you go in with the view that you're setting out to achieve something, rather than something being done to you, the perception and experience of it changes.

The most extreme example I've seen: a CEO told her operations manager there was an individual bonus attached to getting their SOC 2 report out within a certain timeframe. That operations manager would call me, as the auditor, most days, and she was excited about every control and every piece of evidence ticked off. Same framework, same requirements as anyone else. She just believed it was worth it for her, and she could see it was achievable. That showed in how motivated she was and how she experienced every step. She later joined my previous firm as an auditor, because she'd enjoyed it enough to want to do it for other companies.

You don't need a bonus on the line to get there. But you need to know why you're doing it and to treat it as a goal and achievement to enjoy the process.

2. Work as a team, with executive support

This one often drives the mindset we just spoke about. It's hard to hold the right mindset alone, and hard not to when you're working through something with a few colleagues and clear backing from the top.

Teamwork does two things. It makes the audit feel worth it, because leadership visibly cares. And it makes it far more achievable. When one person owns compliance in isolation, it becomes a burden nobody else understands. When it's spread across too many people, it becomes scattered and slow. Two to four people is usually the right size: enough to split the work, unblock each other, problem-solve and keep each other going, without losing the thread.

Executive sponsorship then makes sure the resources are actually there, and that the rest of the business understands why the compliance team is asking for things.

In my last role before starting an audit firm, I was the compliance lead at a SaaS company, with a small team of contributors and strong backing from the executive team. Leadership presented at the all hands on why we were doing it, what it would involve and what it would mean for the business. So when I asked someone for something, nobody needed convincing that it mattered; the whole company was behind it. That was 2017, when SOC 2 was a bigger deal for a company our size than it is now that it's mainstream, but the principle still holds.

3. Take control of the process

Contrary to popular belief, auditors are not there to tell you how to run your business. You should be leading the activities that make sense for your company, and the auditor should be assessing them.

What tends to happen instead is that clients slip into a passive stance, waiting to be told what to do. When they do, the auditor ends up filling the gap and directing things, and the result is a compliance program aligned to the auditor's library of expectations, rather than to how you really operate. That's the surest way to drain both the enjoyment and the value out of the process, because now you're maintaining something that doesn't fit.

Taking control looks like this practical example. Your auditor asks about mobile device management. Instead of scrambling to roll out MDM, you say: that doesn't fit us, because sensitive data doesn't sit on employees' devices. We value people's privacy and autonomy over their own hardware, and we manage the risk by limiting what sensitive data can be accessed or stored on a device in the first place. That is a control. It's also a better one for your business, and you understand it because you designed it.

Do that consistently and the program makes sense to you, the report reflects a company that actually exists, and each conversation with the auditor is about your business rather than a checklist. We call that company-specific context Compliance Metadata. It determines how compliance should work for you, and our open-source Compliance Brain tool helps you map it.

4. Adapt it to the way you actually operate

The most tedious version of an audit is the one that runs alongside the business: a parallel system of documents and evidence, assembled in the weeks before the auditor arrives, then set down again until next year. It also makes things vaguer, not clearer, because now there are two versions of how the company works.

The (more) enjoyable version starts from what you already do and why. You review each other's code because without it more bugs reach production. You restrict who can access production data because you'd rather not explain a breach to a customer. You do those things for their own reasons; it just so happens they satisfy compliance criteria too. Adapting compliance to the way you operate means writing that reasoning down and tidying it up, not inventing new rituals and evidence solely for the auditors.

Done that way, the process becomes something more than compliance. A CEO I worked with, a career coach by background, running a startup of thirty or so people, saw SOC 2 as a way to give his team clarity and confidence about what they were doing. Most of what a young company does - that cares about its customers and their data - is intuitive, but also often undocumented. Working through the audit turned that into something everyone could see: this is what we do, this is why we do it, and this is how we know it happens. The report and audit sign off was more of a by-product.

That's why this point sits at the heart of the psychology. Adapting the audit to how you run makes it understandable, because every control has a reason you can point to. It makes it achievable, because you're not carrying two systems. And it makes it worth it, because the effort gives the business clarity and a valuable, meaningful outcome.

5. Choose an audit partner that fits

Finally, and this can be the one that shapes all the others: choose an audit partner that fits your goals and the way you like to work. Your auditor is on the journey with you, and at its best that relationship feels like an extension of your team.

A good auditor should make you feel that the whole thing is achievable, that you're empowered to take control of the process, and that you understand why each thing is being done. The answer to 'why do we need this?' should never be 'because compliance says so' or 'because it's in our audit library.' It should always come back to your company: your risks, your commitments, your stage.

The difference this makes is hard to overstate. The same framework, with the same team, can be a tedious process that never quite makes sense, or an empowering one that produces better outcomes and, yes, is more enjoyable.

If you take one thing from this

Audits are only hated when they're confusing, when they feel impossible, and when nobody can say what they got out of it. Fix this and, in my experience, people are surprisingly happy to do them again and sometimes actually enjoy them.