How to Measure Compliance [Including KPIs + Examples]

Compliance isn’t just a box you need to tick in order to pass an audit. It’s an ongoing process.

The problem is that most companies treat compliance as a snapshot event. If you only measure compliance once a year during audit season, you’re likely missing opportunities to improve your policies, processes, and controls in order to unlock more growth for your business.

But compliance effectiveness isn’t always straightforward to measure. Whether it’s SOC 2, ISO 27001, or NIST, the frameworks offer you guidance on what you need to implement, and your audits will check you have everything in place and working.

So, what should you do between audits? In this guide, we’ll share how to measure compliance and compliance KPIs (key performance indicators) you should track, and why ongoing compliance management matters what it matters.

What is Compliance Measurement?

Compliance measurement keeps track of your policies, controls, and overall security posture to keep track of how it’s performing against key regulatory requirements across your organization. Keeping tabs on compliance year round ensures that your controls aren’t just present in documentation, but actually operating effectively.

While some frameworks like HIPAA are legal mandates, others like SOC 2 are market mandates, essential for any SaaS company that wants to sell into the enterprise without getting stuck in procurement.

Whether your requirements are legal or contractual, failure to measure them accurately leads to stalled deals, lost contracts, and potential penalties.

Why Compliance Measurement Matters

When you measure compliance based solely on an annual audit result, you encourage a culture of cramming. Teams scramble for two months to generate evidence, fix gaps, and update policies.

The most successful companies? They treat compliance as an on-going project with clear targets and metrics to report on year-round. This also helps to avoid the last-minute scramble in the week and months leading up to an audit.

Year-round compliance measurement helps to

• Avoid Drift: Controls naturally degrade over time as people leave, software updates, and permissions change. Measuring how effective your controls are in real time helps to alleviate any issues.
• Speed Up Sales Procurement: What gets measured gets improved. If you’re constantly lagging on questionnaire response times (and slowing down deals) that has a negative impact on your business.
• Optimize Resource Allocation: If your metrics show that you’re slow to identify issues, that’s something you can work to fix. Without effective measurement in place, you’re flying blind.

5 Compliance Metrics You Should Care About

1. Questionnaire Response Times

Security questionnaires are a critical part of closing enterprise deals. Even with a valid SOC 2 report, many potential customers will want a completed questionnaire before signing a contract.

Unlike some aspects of compliance, questionnaires have a direct line to revenue. The faster you can respond to questionnaires, the less friction there is in your sales cycle, and the quicker you can close deals and get cash in the bank.

Poor questionnaire processes can also have a negative impact on your team. For example, if your sales team or lead engineers are spending 10 hours a week answering the same repetitive questions on Excel sheets, you are burning expensive internal resources on something that you should be automating.

At Workstreet, we work with hundreds of organizations to speed up and automate their questionnaire response times. For example, when we started working with Granola we were able to make an immediate impact on their key compliance metric, helping the Granola team to make questionnaire responses "10x faster," according to its GTM lead Shreman Shrestha. "Our engineers and I have saved 100+ work hours since we started with Workstreet,’ he adds.

2. Time to Identify Issues

The time it takes your organization to spot a security gap is a critical metric. If a non-compliant activity like an unencrypted database or an unauthorized user sits undetected for weeks, it can escalate from a minor issue to a catastrophic data loss or legal nightmare quickly.

By tracking the mean time it takes to identify issues, you ensure your security controls are operating effectively.

If you spot an issues in your system, make sure to report on:

• Detection Time: How long it took your team to spot this issue.
• Time to Resolution: The time it took for the issue to be fully resolved.
• Automated Detection Efficacy: The percentage of issues caught by software vs. manual human discovery.
• False Positive Rate: The frequency of false alarms.
• Employee Reporting Rate: How often staff proactively flag security or compliance concerns.

One way to improve the time it takes to spot security gaps is through continuous monitoring using software like Vanta. These tools will constantly scan your systems and infrastructure ensuring your controls and in place (and maintaining evidences of those controls effectiveness), while notifying you if anything looks off.

3. Average Time to Fix Issues

The inverse of the above, this KPI is how long it takes you to remediate issues, gaps, or vulnerabilities once they’ve been flagged. How effectively and quickly your team can mobilize to get a fix in place is a great performance indicator to keep an eye on. Pay attention to:

• Time to identify the correct fixes
• Time to implement fixes
• Percentage of issues resolved within your target timeframe

4. Employee Training Effectiveness

Employee training is mandatory under frameworks like SOC 2, GDPR, and CMMC. But your employee training program should look beyond prepping for audit, you should constantly ensure your team:

• Onboards and trains new employees
• Runs frequency refresher training
• Has easily accessible handbooks and training documents
  

You should also make sure everyone within your organization is updated as and when compliance requirements change or internal policies are updated.

5. Cost of Fines or Penalties

Non-compliance in a regulated industry can lead to legal costs, fines, and penalties. These can have a huge impact on your business financially, but also reputationally costing you future customers and revenue.

The onus is on your leadership team to fully understand the compliance requirements to operate in your industry and the goal should always be to spend $0 on fines, legal costs or penalties related to compliance. But if you let standards slip or don’t pay attention to what’s required in your industry, it can happen.

Build an Effective Compliance Program

Compliance measurement isn't about satisfying an auditor once a year, it's about proving operational efficiency every day.

If you'd rather focus on building your product than building a complex compliance dashboard, Workstreet can handle the heavy lifting for you. We help you move from checking the box to building continuous, effective compliance programs without slowing down your momentum.