Regardless of where they are based, all institutions have a certain set of employment rules, laws, and regulations they must adhere to. HR Compliance is the businesses’ commitment to these very laws. They govern a company’s policies, systems, and documentation. The inability to abide by employment laws can lead companies to several legal quicksands – triggering a plethora of exorbitant lawsuits.
The HR department plays a massive role to ensure the company meets all its legal obligations. These laws typically handle areas such as accountability of employee health and safety, ensuring the employees get their statutory and contractual entitlements, and designing fair policies that reinforce compliance, to name a few.
HR professionals continue to navigate the rapidly changing wheel of technologies associated with automation and workforce analytics. There has also been a sharp rise in regulation and compliance requirements. The post-pandemic era has unveiled brand new challenges with the rise of remote and hybrid work – exploring and understanding compliance with employment laws during a never-before-experienced situation.
The rise of these complexities has also welcomed a sharp decline in HR productivity. So much so, that The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has revealed that these challenges have sapped 16% and 50% of the productivity among executives.
While these challenges seem overwhelming, the most pressing question every HR manager asks is: How to simplify HR compliance?
Shifting to automated software for all compliance-related tasks, constructing a robust and consistent training program, going paperless for company processes, keeping the employee policies up-to-date, and fostering effective two-way communication pathways are a few of the best ways to simplify HR compliance. Read on to deep dive further into the subject.
Use an Automated Software
HR technology has seen monumental progress in terms of tasks related to payroll, benefits, administration, and many other areas. By doing the heavy lifting for complex and time consuming processes, technology can simply automate these tasks to your HR team and shift their valuable focus on more important matters.
While there has been sufficient technology to amplify HR related processes, most organizations continue to struggle with compliance requirements in the areas of employment and labor.
There are thousands of complex state, federal, and local employment and labor laws that keep changing constantly. Fully complying with these laws is critical if your company wants to lower the risks and liabilities associated with them. Regardless of how efficient your HR team is, chances are, they spend a massive chunk of their time navigating and ensuring compliance with these laws. As a result, your company misses out on the time that could otherwise be used to form strategic objectives across your business. This is where HR compliance technology changes the game. VirgilHR helps organizations integrate their proprietary database of employment and labor law requirements into their HR technology. This helps HR managers make confident and compliant employment decisions.
In addition, it also helps avert the storm of risk and liability and ultimately dodge an avalanche of expensive legal costs and settlements.
Establish a Regular Training Program
When you hold regular training sessions, you reinforce HR compliance within the collective employee mindsets and substantially reduce the possibilities of any compliance mishaps. Aside from conducting regular training sessions, it’s critical to ensure your training is entirely in line with your policies. This is especially important when it comes to smoothing out the path of compliance. From diversity to sexual harassment training – make sure every aspect of your training seeks to reinforce your policies.
Only when both go hand in hand, can your employees have a strong foundation constructed in the policies and just the right path to follow these policies through training.
Lastly, running these pieces of proactively is critical to ensure you wipe out the problems before they begin to form. Instead of waiting for a compliance fiasco to the surface, it’s always better to deploy ongoing training – especially when you want to strengthen your HR compliance messaging and want your employees to soak in the policy changes.
Fortunately, most of these sessions do not require a lengthy offline classroom-like setup. Quick, engaging, and effective online sessions can work wonders in keeping HR compliance at bay.
Go Paperless
With new tech emerging in practically every corner of the company operations, the HR compliance department is no exception.
A mountain of handbooks and forms accompany every HR function and growing companies hardly have the time to swim through oceans of paperwork. Going entirely paperless is the best (and easiest) way to simplify HR compliance – especially if you want to save valuable resources, speed up your processes, and centralize every compliance tool. Digitalization saves your team the time it takes to gather, file, and store all that paperwork. It also saves your company a lot of money and brings down the possibility of errors. In addition, it makes everything highly accessible by storing all the records in the cloud.
Instead of getting that copy machine to work overtime, have your employees e-sign their tax forms, NDAs, and employee contracts. IRS also gives you the option to file electronically and a majority of insurance providers offer paperless processes.
In addition, your employees would welcome the idea of going paperless. They can easily access the information online and don’t have to spend their time scanning the documents.
Consistently Update Employee Handbook and Company Policies
Some organizations may use individual policies while others might rely on a single employee handbook that packs all the policy-related literature. Regardless of the approach, both employee policies and handbooks are typically handled by the HR department. To make matters simpler – consider the individual employee policies and the employee handbook the same.
You may have crafted comprehensive (and highly effective) policies and procedures. Unfortunately, however, they will not mean anything if you use them once and never return them.
Consider these documents as a living and breathing force that must constantly be taken care of. In other words, it’s critical to update and acclimatize these documents to every change in organizational needs and an ever-evolving regulatory landscape.
In most cases, the core policy ingredients will remain unchanged – it is typically their details that need to be revamped so that they can adapt easily for maintaining and protecting the company’s compliance.
Review the policies regularly, run timely revision and approval cycles, and ensure timely dissemination of the changes. Make sure this process becomes a key element of your business operations to help your HR compliance run smoothly.
Foster Two-Way Communication
Crafting and revamping your policies is great. But how do you harvest effective results from them? The answer lies in constantly and regularly conveying all the changes, expectations, and policies to your employees.
It’s critical for employees to deep dive into how these changes can directly reflect on their day-to-day jobs. This will also help them gauge the importance of these changes and ultimately keep the company away from the quicksands of HR risks and liabilities.
In addition, effective two-way communication infuses accountability within all the rungs of the corporate ladder and boosts employee buy-in on how indispensable HR compliance is.
It’s also equally important to open up an easily accessible pathway for employees to express their issues to the leadership. This can be in the form of an ethics hotline. HR managers can also offer support to individuals by attending to their concerns when the time arises. For instance, if an employee is dealing with a workplace safety issue, the communication mechanism should make it easy for them to reach out to the right person and have it addressed quickly.
When you unlock two-way communication, you automatically bring in the values that make the very core of HR compliance – more transparency, openness, and accountability.
Simply put,
HR compliance is a 21st-century issue and requires a 21st-century solution.
VirgilHR is the digital magic wand HR professionals can use to ensure maximum compliance with labor laws in the minimum amount of time. After all, in a world dominated by technology, qualified HR individuals do not have to pour in their valuable time going through a sea of ever-changing employment law literature.
Wondering how to simplify HR compliance? Ready for that smooth sail across a complex set of employment and labor laws? Want to smooth out your compliance issues and help your HR make quick, confident, and compliant employment decisions? Leverage VirgilHR’s compliance solution. Get in touch with us now!
