How to strengthen collaboration across compliance, HR, and legal teams

Large enterprise organizations face a difficult challenge: ensuring effective collaboration in their ethics and compliance programs. With tens of thousands of employees spread across multiple entities and countries, cases often touch several functions at once, legal, HR, compliance, and even local operations.

Without a cross functional approach, organizations risk fragmented responses, missed red flags, and weakened trust in their speak-up culture.

In this post, we’ll explore why poor collaboration across departments and geographies is so damaging, the risks it creates for multinational organizations, and high-level strategies to build effective cross functional compliance teams.

Why collaboration is a challenge in large organizations

For large organizations, collaboration across compliance functions is rarely simple. Case management is not just the job of Compliance or Legal, it spans multiple disciplines. HR may lead harassment investigations, Legal may handle corruption or fraud, and Ethics or Culture teams focus on values. Add in local entities with their own managers and processes, and you quickly see the challenge.

Industry examples highlight the issue. In global mining, local community teams often manage complaints on the ground. But without strong links to headquarters, issues like environmental hazards or corruption allegations may never reach the central compliance team. This disconnect leaves leadership blind to major risks.

Cultural differences, local legal requirements, and siloed communication channels only add to the complexity. Without clear cross-functional coordination, employees in Tokyo may have a very different reporting experience than those in Toronto.

The risks of siloed compliance efforts

When cross-team collaboration fails, the consequences ripple across the organization:

• Inconsistent case handling: Different departments or regions apply different processes, leading to uneven outcomes and employee confusion.

• Missed or delayed escalation: Critical reports get lost when managers assume “someone else” is handling them.

• Duplicated work: Separate teams run parallel investigations, wasting resources and risking conflicting results.

• Loss of trust: Employees lose faith if reports disappear into departmental black holes, eroding the speak-up culture.

• Regulatory exposure: Regulators expect timely, consistent investigations. Silos can create blind spots that lead to compliance failures.

Ultimately, silos in compliance don’t just slow things down, they create risk.

Why cross functional compliance teams are essential

The answer lies in building deliberate cross functional compliance teams. These teams bring together Compliance, Legal, HR, and Ethics as the core members, and involve subject-matter experts as needed. This multidisciplinary structure ensures sensitive cases are managed with the right expertise and confidentiality.

Global organizations often adopt a hub-and-spoke model: a central compliance team at headquarters works with trained compliance contacts in each region. Local officers bring cultural and legal insight, while the central hub ensures consistency and oversight.

This model balances global standards with local knowledge, ensuring every region knows who “owns” compliance issues and that no red flag is ignored.

Best practices for building effective cross functional compliance teams

Forming a team is only the first step. To make collaboration work at scale, large organizations should focus on a few core principles:

1. Keep the core team small but extendable
   Limit the permanent team to essential roles (Compliance, Legal, HR, Ethics). Add specialists case-by-case, such as procurement experts for bribery investigations or external counsel for executive misconduct.

2. Define roles clearly
   Decide who triages reports, who leads investigations, and who communicates with whistleblowers. Role clarity prevents confusion and ensures accountability.

3. Train across functions and regions
   All core members and local officers should receive training in evidence handling, investigations, and the case management system. Managers company-wide should also know how to route concerns into the official process.

4. Standardize processes globally
   Establish a consistent workflow (intake, triage, investigation, resolution, feedback) so that cases are handled the same way everywhere. Document these processes in a global SOP, with room for local legal adjustments.

5. Maintain confidentiality and audit trails
   Use secure systems that log access, updates, and decisions. This protects sensitive data and demonstrates rigor to regulators.

Turning collaboration into a strength

Breaking down silos isn’t just operational hygiene, it’s essential for credibility, trust, and regulatory resilience. Most executives know they need to break silos, but struggle to make it happen. By deliberately structuring cross functional compliance teams, clarifying roles, and standardizing global processes, enterprises can turn fragmented efforts into a coordinated system that employees trust and regulators respect.

For more strategies and a deeper dive into building effective collaboration across regions and compliance, HR, and legal teams, see our full guide on how to manage compliance cases at scale.

‍