4 Steps to Building a Compliance Program that Works

4 Steps to Building a Compliance Program that Works

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Compliance ain’t easy. But it’s not impossible, either.

HR and compliance personnel have a lot to do. Aside from the myriad and constantly changing laws and regulatory bodies, there are technology challenges; consumer complaints; staffing concerns, such as high rates of turnover; the constant possibility of legal disputes with customers and employees alike; and, you know, the everyday pressures of doing business: to accomplish more with less overhead, to find competitive advantages and exploit them.

Considered all at once, workforce compliance can leave one’s head spinning. Can a single system adequately handle it all? Where do you even start?

The answers, respectively, are yes and here. Yes, it’s entirely possible to manage these many compliance challenges through a single system—and we’re about to show you how in the brief, 4-step tutorial here:

Step 1: Educate Your Organization About Compliance

Start with education. No organization is static—business processes change, people come and go, technology gets upgraded and refined—so educate personnel early and often.

There are two especially critical times to prioritize education:

  • During onboarding: Whenever a new hire joins your team, make sure they receive all information about how the organization operates along with all regulatory items that bear on their role. Your responsibility is to make certain they are aware of and understand their responsibilities.
  • In light of job changes and promotions: As personnel change jobs and titles, they may take on different roles and responsibilities. When they do, they’ll need to be aware of all their new compliance obligations: the rules, regulations, policies, and procedures by which they should abide.

Step 2: Certify Compliance Education to Ensure Information Retention

Education means little without certification. Your organization needs to be able to prove compliance to regulators and financial partners (such as your bank), as well as vendors and other third parties with which you do business. A compliance certification process should be able to prove not only that individuals in your organization are aware of workforce policies and procedures, but that people have attested to the information—by completing a quiz or by signing a sworn declaration.

Your certification process may include elements such as

  • interactive policies
  • assessments at the end of training modules
  • reminders to complete assigned trainings
  • attestations of written policies and procedures

Step 3: Periodically Remind Employees and Refresh Compliance Training

Compliance training needs to occur more than once. As time marches on, people tend to forget the compliance trainings they’ve undergone, and need to be reminded of what they’ve previously learned. A compliance issue may not emerge in reality until six months after employees have been trained on it, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Jog employees’ memories with periodic quizzes and the like in the weeks, months, and years after the initial period of education. These reminders need not be as lengthy or detailed as the first training, so long as they keep relevant information fresh in the minds of personnel.

Step 4: Monitor and Update Your Compliance Program as Necessary

Audit your compliance program before regulators do. Pay careful attention to the implementation and outcomes of your compliance efforts for potential areas of improvement. Do employees constantly get stuck on a particular question or topic during training? Do you need to remind personnel about certain regulations more often than others? Does the program help or hinder business goals? Your findings may indicate gaps in your program, ambiguous policy language, or issues with individual supervisors. Make sure your compliance management system allows you to gather and analyze relevant information so you can make necessary improvements quickly and effectively.

At the same time, recognize that your program may need to be revised in accordance with changes in the law, as well as industry trends and best practices. Keep an eye on compliance news, updates in regulatory guidance, and legal patterns (e.g. an uptick in certain kinds of lawsuits, your competitors making headlines for the wrong reasons), and improve your compliance program as necessary.

Now, Automate It!

A robust compliance program is your best defense against fines, legal action, and damage to your reputation and critical business relationships. But a compliance program is not just measured in its past and present-day performance, but its ability to continue generating results next week, next month, next year, and five years from now.

Compligo® is our flagship cloud-based compliance software platform. Mobile-enabled and easy to use for employees and administrators, Compligo takes the cost and complexity out of your compliance processes, helping you meet your ongoing regulatory and organizational requirements—any time, anywhere.

Compligo consolidates all of your assigned activities into one view, providing you with a single dashboard through which you can access policies, online training, and forms, so you can track your workforce’s compliance status instantly.

Learn more about Compligo, Compli’s workforce compliance automation platform.

Joe Aakre

Joe Aakre is Compli’s Senior Sales Engineer, but you might know him better as Professor Joe, our resident scholar and lecturer on all topics compliance. He loves finding simple solutions to complex problems; so much so that he once spent 3 weeks in Shanghai consulting solely on quality assurance. When not geeking out on compliance issues and software, Joe spends his time riding his motorcycle through the Oregon backcountry.

→ Joe Aakre

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