The Keys to Compliance in HR

Workforce compliance encompasses all the processes and documentation necessary to prove adherence to both internal and external rules and regulations governing how businesses manage employees and contractors performing work within the organization. While compliance requirements are a fraction of the responsibilities for HR professionals, they continue to be a source of stress and frustration with ever changing laws, and the continual rollout of new ones.

Non-compliance is costly business, especially for businesses in heavily regulated industries. Based on a recent report by research firm the Ponemon Institute and security company GlobalScape, the annual cost of non-compliance to businesses now runs an average of $14.8 million, a 45% increase since 2011. Non-compliance costs 2.71 times the cost of maintaining or meeting compliance requirements. But no matter the size of your business, and irrespective of the industry, compliance challenges are present in everything from I-9 verification, to FMLA tracking, to PTO tracking, visa expiration management, workplace safety training, and more.

So how do you protect your business and mitigate the risks in your compliance processes?

Here are the keys to meeting compliance regulations:

DOCUMENT. DOCUMENT. DOCUMENT.

Most compliance dictates that documentation is the key to satisfying requirements.  Rarely can you avoid recording evidence of an event and remain compliant.  Consistent, accurate documentation is your best friend when litigation and audits occur.  The challenge one often faces is finding a solution that doesn’t create extra work while reducing exposure to risk.  If the work effort outweighs the costs of risk involved in being non-compliant, there is less motivation to implement compliance programs designed to eliminate these risks.

CHANGE IS CONSTANT

Compliance requirements are constantly evolving, and it seems that the pressure to comply is always increasing.  Whether it comes from government, corporate, or customer mandates, you must remain vigilant and adapt to maintain compliance.  Finding technologies that enable the flexibly to quickly accommodate the flow of changes is imperative to ensure continued compliance, while also keeping costs in check.

INTEGRATION IS KEY

Connecting to other systems ensures external triggers or dependency can be automatically managed without additional human effort.  Not only does it eliminate extra work, it provides another means to build more streamlined compliance processes by leveraging the capabilities of other tools to augment data, logic, and workflows.

As I’ve written before, content-centric systems solve compliance problems. These types of systems are both accurate and efficient, requiring less manpower to perform tasks, as intelligent automation and AI are leveraged. The ability to document, change, and integrate are by-products of systems that incorporate the latest in HR Technology.

While you may be comfortable with record-based systems, you also understand that it requires tremendous effort, precision, and consistency to maintain these documents (PDFs, spreadsheets, emails, file shares). What’s more concerning is that even as detailed as you may be, record-based systems create compliance gaps, leaving your company vulnerable.

While many systems offer compliance solutions, none provide a comprehensive end-to-end solution enabling the flexibility to adapt to constant policy change. Essium’s Xenqu HR Software Solution is a fully customizable solution offering a set of building blocks designed to meet the demands of any workforce compliance problem using the latest cloud-computing technologies and architectures.

We would love to show you how to work compliant by leveraging our team of HR Tech experts, and our team of intelligent robots!

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