Making sure your business complies with all aspects of the law is, unsurprisingly, vital. These areas include data protection, consumer rights, anti-money laundering practices, and so much more. If you want to avoid any penalties and gain the trust of your clients or customers.
However, as a business owner or manager, ensuring that all of your staff in every department is adhering to the correct procedures and following your policies to the letter is easier said than done.
Fortunately, there are several simple but effective steps you can take to help ensure compliance in every area of your business.
Keep Your Policies and Procedures Updated
To help maintain the highest levels of compliance, it’s important that your employee handbook has all of the relevant details on your compliance processes and policies. This document will provide a vital resource for your staff. Not only for new hires but for long-time employees too, who may need to consult the handbook at regular intervals to make sure they are adhering to the regulations.
It can be an intimidating task to set down your policies in such detail (not to mention tweaking them when required), but it is one of the most effective ways to guarantee consistent compliance.
Make Sure Your Staff Are Well-Informed
In addition to setting out compliance procedures in your handbook, you should also invest in online training courses for your employees to ensure that they have a thorough understanding.
There are a wealth of courses available covering all aspects of compliance, from GDPR management to fraud awareness and prevention, consumer rights training, and anti-tax evasion. Enrolling your staff in these online training modules every so often will refresh their knowledge and ensure that they are well-educated on all aspects of compliance.
Get HR Involved
Despite your best efforts, there may be times when staff fail to implement the required processes or policies, particularly if it makes their everyday tasks more complicated and, therefore, more onerous.
To tackle this problem, you may wish to get your human resources department involved. They can help you ensure that a new compliance regulation is applied by all staff, by promoting clear communication to all departments, explaining the importance of the change, and perhaps even instituting a system of rewards to make adopting the new processes more of a positive experience for employees.
Use Compliance Software
It can be more difficult to ensure widespread employee compliance if they have to carry out many of their day-to-day tasks by hand e.g. using manual data entry or even copy and paste.
Fortunately, you can help to make compliance a much simpler task for your staff by embracing the latest compliance-boosting digital tools and software. It will require some initial financial investment, but the expenditure will be well worth it to ensure that your business adheres to the latest regulations.
Conduct Regular Audits
Finally, even if you are pleased with the overall compliance of your employees, it’s still important to conduct regular checks, particularly as regulations are subject to change, and new policies may need to be introduced. Bear in mind that when you carry out audits, some can be announced beforehand. However, others should be unexpected to give you a true picture of the extent of compliance in your workplace.
Keep these tips in mind when looking for ways to help ensure there is compliance in all areas of your business.
