Compliance at work affects all aspects of your company and is a crucial element of any organization’s operating strategy. However, it’s often seen as a major issue for leaders in the workplace. It’s not as difficult as you believe. While it’s true that it’s not something that you can do once, it may take time to work around it. With the right plan and the right tools, making sure your business is in compliance does not have to be a hassle.
In this blog, we’ll discuss workplace compliance and the reasons why it’s essential to protect your business. We’ll cover:
- What is the definition of compliance in the workplace?
- Why is it important to ensure compliance at work?
- How can you establish a compliance environment in your workplace
What does workplace compliance mean?
Workplace compliance refers to the process of adhering to federal, state, or local regulations and laws. Any business, regardless of size, has to follow compliance guidelines. They must also comply with certain requirements regarding privacy, security of data, as well as workplace safety. Enterprise businesses have additional rules to follow for compliance since they usually have multiple offices and data warehouses. Infractions of the law could be costly. Monitoring compliance in your workplace is vital to minimize risks and protect your employees and their personal information.
Why is ensuring compliance at work important?
The concept of compliance management is frequently interpreted as something companies ought to be doing, instead of something they should accomplish. One common misconception about conformity is the notion that one just has to think about getting certifications. Certainly, certifications offer assurance. However, ensuring compliance in the workplace is not a one-time, annually scheduled event. Monitoring the various regulations that govern an organization will take time. The company must constantly review and update its policies and procedures. Let’s examine some of the primary benefits of compliance and why it is essential for your business.
Particularly when it comes to export-controlled data, compliance isn’t only about certifications; it’s about maintaining compliance with regulations that safeguard sensitive data. Failure to comply can result in millions of dollars in lost revenue, fines, and even harm to relationships with long-standing clients.
Let’s examine the main reasons that compliance management is crucial for your company.
safeguards both workplace safety and your data.
Everyone has a part to play in keeping your workplace safe and in compliance. Employees manage personal data constantly. They also have access to sensitive information and other information, based on their job. If employees don’t know how to ensure that company data is secure, they could pose a security threat to your company. It’s essential that employees know their obligation to ensure conformity. Here are some examples of various teams other than IT managing data that need to be protected:
- Finance: Addresses, numbers for credit cards, account numbers
- Marketing: Cookies, email addresses, browser history, click-tracking, mail preferences, Facebook activities, and, in certain cases, names and images
- HR: Numbers for Social Security, names and addresses for self-identification, immigration, and various details about the demographics of a population
- Operation: Customer names, client contacts, purchase histories, and visitor logs
Secures sensitive information
In the event of the COVID-19 pandemic in the year 2000, there was a need for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as well as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to issue mandatory guidelines for companies regarding how to stop and limit the spread of COVID-19 in the workplace. This meant that companies required a secure way to keep private information about employees regarding employee health. To handle this, a lot of businesses decided to invest in a workplace system that allows employees to:
- Verify the status of vaccination or test results for COVID
- Check your health on a daily basis
- Track which employees are on site and at what time.
- All the while safeguarding personally identifiable information
In the same way, companies handling sensitive or export-controlled data have secure information related to ITAR compliance. This involves keeping track of visitor logs, securing access to data, and ensuring that only authorized employees have access to the restricted area. Failure to comply could be a cause for fines as high as $500,000 and the loss of business relations.
Conserves money
In the absence of ensuring that your workplace’s compliance could be costly. The total cost of not complying with the law is approximately $14.82 million for companies today. An organization can lose the equivalent of $5.87 million of revenue because of an incident of non-compliance. However, the financial consequences go well beyond revenue. It’s far more costly to your business’s bottom line. To fully comprehend the costs of a non-compliant event, take into consideration several of these hidden expenses. They include:
- Penalties, fines, and other fees
- Disruptions to business
- Loss of business or contract partner
- Loss of productivity
- Assets are lost
- Reputation damage
How can you establish a compliant workplace
Implementing a compliance-oriented culture in your workplace can help ensure that your organization is secure and safe. Here are the most important duties, policies, and tools your company requires to develop the right culture of compliance:
Set up a compliance management team
As compliance management is becoming more prominent, administration, businesses are establishing new roles and titles. A compliance team could be only one person or even an entire department. Whatever number of employees you employ, your compliance team should be responsible for five areas: identification, prevention of violations, monitoring and detection, resolution, and advice. There are several tasks you could consider for your compliance management tiger team
- Compliance manager: Compliance managers stay current on the latest laws and regulations, and make sure that the company abides by these to reduce risks to the legal and financial.
- A data protection official: A Data protection officer is responsible for establishing and directing the company’s strategy for protecting data and its implementation.
- A risk management manager: A risk management officer is able to identify weaknesses and risks faced by an organization and offers suggestions on how to minimize or mitigate the issues.
Perform internal audits.
Internal audits are an opportunity to look at the procedures and programs in a company and see the way you’re performing. Consider an audit as you would imagine running a diagnostic application on your personal computer. You’re not sure whether something is off; however, if it is something wrong, you need to be aware of it so that you can correct it before it turns into a major issue. Set up a procedure for your compliance group to perform a periodic annual internal audit. This will help you detect weaknesses before they become an issue and develop an action plan to fix these issues.
Ensure that your staff members are adequately trained.
Engaging employees in compliance issues isn’t an easy task. But it’s crucial to spread the message that compliance is the responsibility of everyone. Make it easy and easy means for employees to grasp the guidelines and code of conduct they have to adhere to. Also, make sure that you modify it based on the area. You’ll need to train your employees frequently, make the information easily accessible, and keep track of and evaluate your progress.
Make use of workplace technology
Technology for workplaces is an essential element of creating a compliant workplace culture. Many companies feel pressured to develop a sustainable infrastructure as well as procedures to ensure compliance. One aspect of a company’s operational infrastructure is controlling the people who come in and out of your office every day, which includes managing visitors. Making the transition to digital for the management of visitors will aid in maintaining conformity and offer the following advantages:
- Cloud-based storage of data: The system will flag individuals that should not be permitted into the designated area using sophisticated block lists, identification checks, and cross-checks with watch lists
- Anonymization and data security: You can improve compliance with privacy laws by keeping the personal data of your visitors in a central, secure place
- Efficiency in operation: Automate and streamline the check-in process for visitors and access management by reducing errors in entry by hand and human errors. This speeds up operations while ensuring consistency across all sites.
Reducing compliance risks without disrupting the workplace environment could be intimidating. With the right tools, you won’t need to choose between secure compliance and a fantastic work environment.