Dial back a couple of years and in many organisations, it was HR that was heavily involved in addressing the new requirements of the impending GDPR legislation. In fact, compliance responsibilities often get placed with the HR team, likely due to the people factor involved such as the requirements for learning and development that arise when new rules come into force.
Today, regulatory compliance demands on businesses are even greater, not just in the areas of risk and health and safety - where employers must deliver a COVID-secure workplace – but also in the realms of cybersecurity and data protection during a time of increased homeworking.
Fostering a positive culture around compliance is one way in which HR can help to spread the workload. Building understanding across your business of what needs to be done and why should ensure employees in all roles get ‘on board’ and operate in a way that supports compliance activities.
Try the following three approaches to create a compliance culture in your organisation:
TIP #1: Get everyone up to speed
It’s not always obvious to individuals why things need to be done in a certain manner in order to meet compliance requirements. But without a clear understanding of the ‘why’, it’s easy for standards to slip, steps to be forgotten, or processes to inadvertently be changed – and that can soon result in non-compliance.
What HR could do is embark on an education programme that is appropriate to job functions and the level of compliance risk associated with the tasks undertaken in particular roles. Clearly, everyone now needs to have a good understanding of areas such as health and safety in the office environment and cybersecurity. But not everyone will need to be familiar with the nuances of pensions or company ethics, for example.
HR should ensure that everyone is up to speed on the compliance requirements relevant to their role in order to build understanding and buy-in to the required working standards and practices. And don’t forget this should be regularly updated when rules change. A good way to keep on top of individual learning and development linked to compliance is to utilise HR software to keep track – and create alerts for refreshers when they are due.
TIP #2: Embed compliance processes into day to day workflows
One proven way to change behaviours is to ensure the specific steps or actions required are built into the day to day activities. One example might be an automated prompt that pops up on the system when something needs to be done or checked. Once the activity is completed, it’s then ‘ticked’ as done and can be traced back as part of a compliance audit process at a later date.
Modern software systems often have functionality built in to make this easy to accommodate. A good example is cloud-based HR technology which has specific functions to request consent for data to be held (as per GDPR legislation) and then acknowledge when it’s been given. This makes it easy for the HR administrator to ensure they are automatically taking the correct actions when they are processing personal data.
TIP #3: Use software to help
Leading on from the point above, clearly, HR can make better use of software to help alleviate the compliance burden. HR is commonly tasked with keeping health and safety training records up to date, managing specific skills or professional development qualifications, and reporting back to the partners or external third parties about what has been done. All of which can be time-consuming and admin heavy – especially the reporting element. With appropriate software in place, compiling compliance reports is much faster and more accurate too.
The key to success with any kind of compliance activity is to make it seamless. Without obvious differentiation between compliance activity and other work, the compliance simply becomes part of ‘how we do things’ rather than an additional burden. When that happens, it means you will have achieved a true compliance culture.
For further inspiration about how HR leads can achieve quick wins in compliance and other core people areas, such as the employee experience, visit our HR Transformation Hub.
You can also discover our full suite of eLearning courses, which cover compliance right through to health and safety, cyber awareness, and professional development.