5 Tips to Guarantee Compliance in the Office Workplace
Workplace compliance is crucial for any business. Unfortunately, it can be a challenge to meet for many. Ensuring compliance is integral to the smooth operation and daily workflow and ensures that best practices for security and legal regulations are met. While it’s not always easy to get everyone on the same page, businesses must take the necessary steps toward encouraging a compliant workplace. Here are tips to guarantee compliance in the office workplace.
- Audit Policies and Procedures
The best thing to do to ensure compliance in the workplace is to conduct an audit of workplace policies and procedures. It helps to ensure that your staff understand these policies and procedures, including their legal entitlements and obligations. A regular audit is the only way to guarantee your policies remain updated. But before you conduct the audit, ensure that all policies and procedures are easily accessible to everyone, such as on a shared drive and are clearly labelled.
A compliance audit is a comprehensive review of the organisation’s adherence to regulatory guidelines. It’s one way of assuring the governing authorities that your business complies with the rules and regulations. The audit will also assess whether the employees are aware of these regulations. An audit report should also cover the resilience of compliance preparations, risk management processes, security policies, and user access controls. Audits help organisations to follow processes and procedures. It’s one way to ensure the organisation fulfils its outside obligations, such as legal agreements and other rules and regulations.
- Remove any Barriers
To ensure that your workforce remains compliant, you must remove any barriers to compliance. Aside from putting in the effort to develop relevant policies and documenting them in the employee guidebook, make sure your staff will have access to them and have the opportunity to review them. Thus, allocate time during the onboarding process to review guidelines with new employees and ensure that you are open to any inquiries regarding policies and procedures.
If your organisation is having a hard time implementing some policies since their relevance is becoming unclear, it’s about time that you review the policy. You must keep these guidelines in the front of everyone’s minds and be open to tweaking them to remain abreast of the current environments. That way, it will be easier for the team to remember and respect the requirements put in place.
Another thing you can do to remove barriers to compliance is to provide a checklist. Everyone loves the idea of checking off items from a list. If some internal processes require following a sequence of events, a reminder in the form of a checklist can help team members stay clear of what’s necessary and offer a satisfying way to mark their progress.
- Continuous Education and Learning
One of the most effective ways to reinforce compliance procedures and policies is to provide regular training. Continuously undertaking compliance training courses can help employees stay updated with the latest compliance. The more familiar your staff with compliance, the less likely they can forget them.
Prevent the stigma of compliance failure and turn negatives into positives by providing ongoing employee training on compliance. For instance, as an employer, you must provide mandated employment notices for a certain period each year. If you end up missing one of the deadlines, you must not brush it under the rug. You should still send out the notice even if it’s already late.
Don’t waste time blaming the team responsible for such a mistake. Instead, use that as an opportunity to train your team on procedures. Take it a notch further – ask for their input on how to keep this from happening again. When you focus on the positive instead of dwelling on the mistake, you will be surprised to find a new and better solution you may not have thought about earlier.
- Create Clear Company Values
Establishing a set of values that are easy for employees to understand helps them get a good grasp of what the business stands for. If you don’t set clear values, building a culture of compliance is like baking a cake without any recipe to serve as your guide – the result will not make sense. But if you can clearly define company values, you can build a culture of compliance around them.
Your company values will give your employees an idea of what they have to be passionate about to progress in the organisation, guiding them through their daily roles while motivating them to act in a specific manner. It helps employees make better professional decisions and align with the organisation’s mission statement.
For instance, instilling a value of integrity or always doing the right thing can encourage compliant behaviour amongst your employees. How should you act if no one else is around? Integrity means being honest and consistently adhering to values even when no one is around. If this is your core value, employees can see the value of compliance training aligned with establishing a safe and supportive company culture and work environment.
- Get a Professional Opinion
It’s always a good idea to seek a professional opinion from a legal expert when implementing compliance in your office workplace. Look for a trusted legal team who is knowledgeable about the intricacies of employment law and will help safeguard your business and employees.
Consider working with compliance lawyers who can oversee and assist with your organisation’s ethics and compliance program. These lawyers can also help ensure that your organisation and your employees are following industry standards on regulations and state and federal laws.
Part of the duty of a compliance attorney is to create legal and financial risk management strategies and establish auditing and monitoring programs based on these strategies. Some organisations have non-lawyers helping them in compliance. You can seek the services of a compliance lawyer to assist the non-lawyer in understanding the legal risks associated with proposed policies and procedures.
Photo credits: eOffice
