Business compliance with the governance, laws, and regulations is essential. However, it’s not enough to establish policies and procedures. You’ll need to take extra measures to ensure that everyone in your company understands them using the right distributive mediums and amount of collaboration.
Ensuring compliance within your company while keeping your business activity afloat and secure can be time-consuming and challenging. But you can achieve it with ease with the proper steps. So, if you feel like instructions are not being followed, or no one is paying attention to your company’s policies and procedures, here are tips on how to ensure compliance within your company.
Schedule regular audits.
It’s crucial that businesses schedule regular audits by testing their systems and procedures; otherwise, they may never correctly identify the ineffective and inadequate procedures hindering compliance within the company. Furthermore, audits ensure that everyone in an organization is current and compliant with the company’s policies.
For better efficiency, compliance software solutions are a great way to make auditing easier. A good example is Securd, a zero-trust security service provider that ensures your internet is safe is free from malware infections and cyber-attacks, and allows for efficient risk management in your business operations.
It’s always better to have an independent internal auditor conducting audits and reviewing compliance. In addition, these audits don’t always have to be announced. This is because unannounced audits often present a better opportunity to detect suspicious patterns that indicate non-compliance and fraudulent activities in vendor payments and financial statements.
Stay current with laws and regulations.
In many cases, laws and regulations are constantly changing. Therefore, your policies and procedures shouldn’t be stagnant either. You must continually and consistently monitor changing laws and regulations and identify how they impact your business.
Staying on top of your game regarding laws and regulations helps you adhere to your industry’s best practices and eliminates the risk of feeling overwhelmed when these legislations are fully enforced.
Admittedly, it can be challenging to understand some laws and regulations, let alone apply them. However, you can hire specialists or consultants like Caitlin Gossage, who has years of experience providing legal counsel and is currently the chief compliance officer with Forthlane partners.
Document and properly organize policies and procedures.
Nothing significantly influences a business’s success like a well-documented handbook, and this is why it’s essential to document your company’s policies and procedures. Your employee handbook doesn’t have to be sophisticated or complex. Instead, it should be simple and easy to digest by all employees. So, remember to color-code your privacy policy and other policies for quick reference.
Furthermore, not only should you spend time drafting and documenting policies and procedures, but you should also ensure that it’s easily accessible by all employees, irrespective of their management level or department. This will help eliminate the issue of employees abandoning policies because they were not accessible. The fact is, your policies and procedures should be simple, accessible, and subject to regular updates that reflect the present day’s laws and regulations. Remember, static documents will inevitably become irrelevant and outdated.
Remove compliance bottlenecks.
The best way to ensure compliance within your company is to identify, tackle and eliminate compliance bottlenecks. In many cases, this could be a lack of understanding by your employees. Therefore, besides implementing the above tips, you must ensure that you allocate time for reviewing company policies.
Another way to eliminate compliance bottlenecks is by conducting regular training programs that communicate the ‘why’ behind policies and procedures. Also, integrating checklists into your processes will reinforce the importance of completing each step and process. Lastly, after applying all these measures, you can implement the stick or carrot approach to reward your employees. With a reward system, employees are more likely to embrace the change.
