HR departments must comply with countless laws and regulations surrounding workplace and employment practices. Noncompliance with these laws can cause serious reputational, financial, and legal damages.
With so many employment and labor laws to track and serious complications attached to every case of non-compliance, how can HR teams ensure their companies remain compliant every single time?
This is where VirgilHR’s compliance software solution comes in. Through its expansive set of tools and resources, VirgilHR helps companies stay compliant with employment and labor laws in real-time. This helps HR teams save countless hours that can be redirected toward handling strategic objectives across their organization. By ensuring no change in laws go unnoticed, we help companies mitigate monetary, financial, and reputational risks of noncompliance. Let’s understand how VirgilHR can become a trusted compliance partner for HR professionals.
Why is HR Compliance Important?
What makes compliance with labor and employment laws so important? These factors do:
- Maintaining a positive reputation. Incidents of non-compliance – from unsafe working conditions to misclassification of employees – often do the rounds of media. This can harm your company’s reputation, stunt your hiring and retention efforts, and jeopardize customer trust.
- Keep legal issues and fines at bay. External compliance audits can come knocking at your company’s door at any given moment. These audits aim to determine whether your company adheres to specific regulatory guidelines. Alternatively, when a company is not in compliance, employees and ex-employees have the ability to file an employment suit against the company. When your organization complies with different laws and regulations, your business avoids both financial losses and legal troubles.
- Create a great workplace culture. HR compliance is one of the main ingredients to cultivating a great workplace culture. It is critical to attract talent, retain valuable employees, and ensure employees remain productive. Keeping compliant with employment and labor laws ensures employees receive the greatest benefits afforded to them under the law and keeps a fair and consistent experience for employees.
The Prevalence of Legal Issues within HR Teams
With countless laws to keep track of, a single mistake is enough to trigger a wave of legal troubles. Here are some common examples of legal issues HR teams often deal with:
Wage and Hour Laws
Handling employee payroll goes beyond just matching the number of hours worked with an hourly wage. There are payroll deadlines to manage, garnishments to handle, state-wide HR laws to be determined, and tax liabilities to be deciphered. Wage and hour laws also vary in different states. For instance, the U.S. minimum federal wage amounts to $7.25 per hour but the state of Oregon requires the minimum hourly wage to be $13.50. Any discrepancy in calculating these costs can cost companies thousands in losses.
Worker Classification
Worker classification is the process of categorizing individuals who perform work for an organization as either employees or independent contractors. The classification determines how workers are treated, the benefits they receive, and the obligations and responsibilities of both the employer and the worker.
Misclassification of workers can have serious legal and financial consequences for businesses. Penalties for misclassification can include fines, back wages, unpaid taxes, and potential lawsuits. Therefore, accurately classifying workers according to the applicable legal standards is crucial for organizations to ensure compliance with labor laws and regulations.
Workplace Safety
OSHA, or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, oversees laws that ensure the safety of workers in the workplace. OSHA fines generally go over $134,000. Insurers also routinely schedule audits due to countless risks to employees’ workplace safety. Without the right technology, these audits can take countless hours to prepare for and cause severe reputational and legal damages if a case of noncompliance arises.
Retirement and Pension Plans
Laws surrounding retirement and pension plans are in a state of constant flux. Not complying with ERISA – the federal law regulating voluntary retirement plans – can unleash a lengthy series of penalties for companies. A single case of improper distribution is usually enough to cost a company $16,000.
Employee Classification
Aside from avoiding payroll errors, businesses also face issues with employee classification. To stay in line with the current talent market, many organizations welcome a diverse range of employees. These include hybrid or remote workers, independent contractors, and part-time employees. It is critical to understand the type of wages and benefits these employees are eligible for based on their location and hours worked. Failure to comply with state and local laws across multiple locations can quickly lead companies into legal trouble.
How VirgilHR’s Resources Can Assist with HR Compliance
Organizations must comply with countless federal, state, and local employment and labor laws that evolve constantly. Due to this, HR teams spend heavy chunks of time and money to track compliance requirements. Despite this, they still face significant risks, liabilities, and vulnerability to expensive legal costs and settlements.
VirgilHR’s SaaS solution helps HR professionals stay compliant with labor and employment laws in real-time, without the need for countless hours of manual research. As a result, companies avoid thousands in legal fines and maintain a positive company reputation. Here’s how VirgilHR can become your HR team’s compliance partner:
- Helps maintain compliance with all employment and labor laws. More than 4,300 employment and labor laws currently govern U.S. companies. VirgilHR’s software helps companies understand which local, state, and federal laws apply to their activities. This helps you stay compliant and avoid heavy legal fines.
- Mitigate risks and liabilities. With 1:10 employers sued by their employees every year, it is critical to stay compliant with all applicable laws. By offering step-by-step instructions on how to adhere to these laws, VirgilHR’s software keeps organizations shielded from legal risks and financial liabilities.
- Control legal costs. U.S. companies shell out over $14 billion on external legal counsel every year. VirgilHR’s resources and prescriptive legal guidance help companies save thousands in consulting employment and labor attorneys.
How to Tap into VirgilHR’s Compliance Tools?
VirgilHR’s software solution arms HR teams with the right tools and resources to stay compliant with every labor and employment law. Some of our compliance tools include:
- Automated Chatbot. Our smart, automated chatbot furnishes HR teams with instant (and real-time) employment and labor law guidance. This erases the need for extensive legal research and helps HR make compliant employment decisions every single time.
- Employee Handbook Builder. Our Employee Handbook Builder helps HR affordably and effortlessly craft comprehensive and compliant Employee Handbooks for their organizations. This tool unlocks multiple templates related to federal, state, and local policies.
- Multi-State Comparison Tool. Keeping up with employment and labor laws surrounding multiple locations is a highly complex task. Through its side-by-side comparison chart highlighting applicable topics, VirgilHR makes this process easier by helping HR teams compare laws across multiple jurisdictions.
- Policies and Forms. From investigation reports to accommodating requests, we make a variety of policy and form templates available at local, state, federal, and general levels.
- Legal Notification. VirgilHR immediately notifies HR teams of any change in the employment and labor laws. With our Legal Notification tool, HR teams no longer have to deal with the anxieties of tracking legal changes 24/7.
- Contact an Expert. Our revolutionary software allows you submit questions on any HR topic area to an HR expert and receive prompt responses from professionals who possess a wide range of HR expertise.
The Next Step
HR compliance goes beyond a set of administrative tasks. It helps companies maintain a positive reputation, protects them from legal and financial losses, and creates a safe, transparent, and fair environment for their workforce.
At VirgilHR, our goal is to help HR teams stay on top of employment and labor laws by making it effortless to navigate them. By bridging the compliance knowledge gap, we help HR teams make compliant decisions every step of the way. Reach out to us to pave the way for a compliant workplace.
