What is the workplace procedure to ensure compliance

Company policies protect your business from frivolous lawsuits. They are designed to give equal opportunities to all employees, to create a safe work environment, and to inform workers about what they can expect from the leadership team. But even the most well-meaning corporate policies are useless if they aren’t followed consistently and to the letter. Follow these steps to ensure compliance with policies and procedures in the workplace.

Inhaltsverzeichnis Show

1. Create Policies
2. Spread Awareness
3. Lead by Example
4. Be Reasonable
5. Follow the Law
1. Document policies and procedures
2. Apply your policies and procedures consistently
3. Remove compliance barriers
4. Use training as reinforcement
5. Stay up to date on laws and regulations
6. Make sure the whole team is following procedures
7. Conduct compliance audits regularly
8. Use tools and software to help simplify compliance

1. Create Policies

Do you have company policies? You need to be proactive. Don’t just assume you can come up with coherent, fair policies on the fly as situations arise. If you don’t have policies in place, your HR team needs to make this a priority. Solicit input from managers, but your human resources department has the final say in the policy-making process. You want to create policies that will be best for your company. That might, at times, conflict with what your employees will want.

You should have policies to cover:

Holidays, vacations, sick days, and personal leave
Performance evaluations and improvement
Equal Employment Opportunity
Employee classifications
Payment schedules, including advances, deductions, and overtime
Meals and breaks
Terminations

There are several additional policies you may want to create. Will you allow concealed weapons at your place of work? Will you conduct background checks or drug tests on applicants or employees? What is the procedure if one employee accuses another of bullying or harassment? Can employees bring pets to work? Knowing how you’ll proceed before a heated issue comes up helps to ensure compliance because it sets expectations.

2. Spread Awareness

If no one knows what the policies are, it’s impossible to ensure compliance. A full, detailed list of your policies should be readily accessible at all times. Print out a binder and leave it in the employee break room. Give each new hire a hard and digital copy of corporate policies when he or she is hired. Most importantly, go over the policies to verify that the employee understands and agrees to abide by each one. Ignorance should never be an excuse for not following a corporate policy.

Incorporate your corporate policies into your onboarding process. Go beyond uploading the documents to your onboarding software. Your software should allow you to schedule to-do lists for your new hires, and show you whether or not these tasks have been completed. Don’t just make your company policies mandatory reading material. Create a quiz or questionnaire that prompts employees to share their thoughts about policies. It will be good feedback for you, and it will give new hires the chance to really consider each policy and its potential impact.

3. Lead by Example

Compliance starts at the top. If your managers are taking extended lunch breaks, using company property for personal business, or posting unauthorized updates on social media, your employees will either follow suit or become disillusioned with their leadership. Corporate policies are for everyone, from the CEO to the college intern. If anyone in the company doesn’t follow policy, others will believe that they don’t have to, either. Inconsistency is the biggest danger to successful implementation of your corporate policies.

Consistency is about more than trying to ensure compliance. If an employee ever decides to file a lawsuit against your business, precedents will be a part of that lawsuit. Did you follow every HR policy to the letter, or have you been making exceptions for some? This doesn’t mean that you need to blindly enforce your policies. A salaried employee, for example, may not be subject to the same strict rules as an hourly temp. But document any discrepancies and your reasoning behind them to protect the company should an employee file suit.

4. Be Reasonable

You don’t necessarily need to create a hard and fast rule for everything. You should be proactive and have some sort of general guideline for most scenarios, though. If you’re not sure about a certain policy, don’t exclude it from your corporate policies altogether. Instead, note that this situation “will be handled according to the manager’s discretion.” This leaves the door open for you to change policies later on if they don’t seem right for your business.

5. Follow the Law

There are certain policies every business needs to have in place according to federal law. Review your corporate policies with an attorney to ensure compliance with OSHA, labor laws, and other acts. Remember, your company policies are more than a guide or a handbook. In a court of law, they are typically treated as a contract between an employer and its employees. This is not something you want to put off until a situation arises. Create and ensure compliance with corporate policies now to avoid trouble in the future.

Setting company-wide expectations – and having them met consistently – is a difficult challenge for all businesses. . Ensuring compliance to these expectations in the workplace is not only integral to smooth function in daily workflow, but to ensure best practices for security and compliance measures are met. We’ve compiled the best processes and philosophies for setting and maintaining company policies that stay relevant, alive, and applicable to help ensure compliance in the workplace wherever possible.

1. Document policies and procedures

Putting policies down on paper (or having them somewhere accessible digitally to employees) not only lends them more authority and weight, it will also make them readily available to employees looking to stay on top of the best methods. Consider requesting input from multiple players within your company to create a “living” document that is updated to stay adaptable and relevant as situations change both internally and externally.

2. Apply your policies and procedures consistently

Consistency is absolutely necessary for success. Policy compliance should be demonstrated from the top down, setting the tone for employees in every role within the company. This is especially relevant to security protocol and procedures. Setting expectations through open communication will help keep policies relevant, too – consider sitting down for a team meeting at least once a year to review documented guidelines, including an open conversation about what works best and contributes most strongly to streamlined performance. This type of natural, ongoing conversation will integrate policies into company culture beyond the feeling of obligatory mandates.

3. Remove compliance barriers

If you’ve put time into crafting relevant policies and documenting them in a guidebook, make sure that your staff has an opportunity to actually read them! Allocate time in the onboarding process for guidelines review and make sure your door is open to any inquiries regarding policies.

If your team is having trouble implementing a certain policy because its relevance becomes less clear, it’s time to review the policy. Keeping guidelines in the front of everyone’s minds and being open to tweaking them to stay abreast of current environments makes it easier for your team to remember and respect the requirements set in place.

INCLUDE A CHECKLIST – Everyone loves the satisfaction of checking items off a list! If some internal processes require a certain sequence of events, a reminder in the form of a checklist will help team members stay clear on what’s required as well as provide a satisfying way of marking their progress for a project.

4. Use training as reinforcement

Communication is a key player in ensuring compliance in the workplace. Regular training sessions with all levels of management and staff make codes crystal clear and memorable, reducing the chances of negative situations (missing deadlines or not meeting obligations) in favor of positive ones (group discussions and company-wide reminders to work as a team). The “train, don’t blame” philosophy will go a long way in mitigating conflict and potential to miss the mark.

5. Stay up to date on laws and regulations

Making sure that your team is staying organized and prepared for constant evolution can help ensure compliance with effective policies. Your company’s HR, IT, safety, and compliance departments should stay in an active cycle of “review/update/implement/maintain” to actively ensure relevance – and therefore, compliance. Don’t forget to stay on top of changing security, safety, and employment-related laws and regulations from State and Federal governments.

6. Make sure the whole team is following procedures

Policies won’t hold water if they’re only enforced in select situations. Every team member is subject to company regulations and processes, especially when following said guidelines impacts daily workflow. If just one person does not follow security measures, it could lead to severe consequences, such as a data breach. The best way to maintain consistency in compliance is to have an energetic HR, Safety, and IT teams, compliance officers, and management keeping their finger on the pulse of the company. Communication, reasoning (explaining the “why”), rewards, and continuous training will contribute to a smoothly functioning office on every level.

7. Conduct compliance audits regularly

Not sure how compliance is looking these days? Test it! Compliance audits reveal how policies can be updated or changed to be more clear and applicable as well as spotlighting any bottlenecks or security gaps in implementation and practice.

8. Use tools and software to help simplify compliance

If consistency is important (and really, when is it not?), staying on top of digital tools can help your company stay efficient and avoid missing links and flaws. Software can often be tuned to meet specific regulations in your geographic area or industry, reducing the risk for manual-entry errors and enhancing connectivity and access for all.

Does your business need help to organize important data to ensure compliance in the workplace? Records Management Center can help! Contact us today to learn more.