38 Examples of Accountability Measures

John Spacey, March 15, 2023

Accountability measures are practices, processes and cultures that ensure that persons are held accountable for all decisions and actions of an organization. Failures happen and when they do, there is an organizational process of recovering, learning and moving on. As part of this process, individuals are identified who own the failure. Generally speaking, these are the persons with the most direct authority to prevent the failure. The following are processes that can be used to ensure accountability.

Accepting and reviewing complaints from anyone i.e. members of the public	Accountability culture
Anonymous feedback	Audit trails – digital records that capture everything that happens on systems
Authorization and authentication – limited number of people who can access systems and resources	Clear roles and responsibilities
Clearly defined decision authority that always falls to a named person	Code of conduct
Compliance audits	Compliance management
Continuous monitoring	Decision rationales
Disciplinary action	Disciplinary policy
Escalation processes	Governance bodies
Incident reporting	Independent review
Internal controls e.g. approval processes	Managing low performance
Monitoring systems	Non-compliance reporting
Oversight boards	Peer review
Performance goals	Performance management process
Policy enforcement	Record keeping
Red flag system	Remedial measures
Responsibility documentation e.g. RACI matrix	Risk assessments
Risk management processes	Separation of duties
Stakeholder feedback	The principle that accountability can’t be delegated
Transparency processes	Whistleblower programs

It is not enough to blame failures on the human error of low level employees. Deep systematic flaws such as latent human error are considered in accountability measures. In this context, a process such as 5-whys is helpful. For example:

5-whys

A train crashed.
Why?
The locomotive engineer was going too fast.
Why?
The locomotive engineer was under pressure to meet a schedule.
Why?
The operations team is often missing deadlines and is under pressure to improve.
Why?
Executive management has been underinvesting in systems and infrastructure for more than a decade such that the firm has serious capacity and reliability issues.