Organizations are increasingly facing an array of regulatory challenges and uncertainties amidst a major shift in the economic and environmental landscape. Be it any industry domain, every company is expected to comply with ever evolving industry regulations. This is where effective compliance management program has become ever more crucial.
An Internal Compliance Program or ICP is implementation of a compliance management process for managing and monitoring compliance of all business functions within the organization to ensure adherence to regulatory guidelines as established by the organization and the government authorities. Compliance management is not a one-step or one-time activity but an ongoing process that tracks adherence to a variety of policies, procedures, security controls, and documentation.
Some of the common areas where compliance issues crop up within an organization are:
- Labor laws including – Employee wages and hourly pay; Anti-discrimination and Anti-harassment laws against employees, payroll taxation, employee information protection, Workplace and Occupational Safety laws for workers etc.
- Immigration laws for global operations
- Global Trade Laws
- Taxation and ACcounting Laws
- IT including – Data Protection and Cyber Security laws
- Vendor Compliances; amongst others
How can organizations implement an efficient ICP using an effective step-by-step approach? Let’s explore.
Step-by-Step Approach Toward Compliance Management
A compliance management strategy or plan should include all steps and activities that ensure compliance with industry regulations. Here is a stepwise approach for organizations to put in place strong compliance processes:
1. Monitor Changing Laws and Regulations Continuously
As we said earlier compliance management is a continuous process of monitoring laws and regulations including new requirements introduced by the authorities that could impact the organization or its industry sector. Businesses must stay agile to identify new guidelines, prepare themselves internally to adapt to the new changes and implement appropriate compliance processes on a timely basis.
By staying up-to-date with new laws and through adequate preparation, organizations can stay on top of compliance laws and adapt whenever new legislation comes into effect.
2. Hire Professional Expertise
For new companies or startups, compliance management can be a complex and daunting process. Hiring compliance management professionals with industry expertise in can prove to be a huge asset to small and growing companies. They can help establish company policies and compliance processes as per industry regulations. Compliance experts can also help train business owners and employees in effective compliance management and can address queries or concerns on an ongoing basis.
3. Perform Regular Complete Risk Assessments
For most industries, regulations are clear and well-defined by regulatory bodies. These standards should be the foundation of the company’s compliance management plan. It must include the ability to identify potential risks or business areas that are susceptible to non-compliance. It is not only important to be able to identify where potential regulatory failures can occur and how to prevent them but also to have a plan of action for risk mitigation or loss management in place in case such a breach or a lapse takes place.
4. Proper Communication and Training Programmers to Ensure Employee Adherence to Policies and Defined Procedures
Compliance plans or company policies are effective only when they are followed by employees. Often, employees may not adhere to them or adapt to compliance-driven changes and alter their daily practices.
Here, the HR team must ensure communicating company policy changes clearly to its employee base. To ensure compliance, organizations must conduct regular employee training to help them to understand the policies and importance of adherence to the same. Employees must also have access to the most current information about compliance procedures and policies.
5. Selection of the Right Compliance Management Solution
Compliance management without use of technology is complex and challenging to execute. Manual interventions are time-consuming, effort-intensive, and prone to errors and oversights. Organizations must invest in the right technology solution to minimize lapses due to any human errors, stay up-to-date with with industry regulations and establish strong compliant business operations. Technology tools can play a vital role through digitization, automation and secure compliance processes.
5. Invest in building a Culture of Compliance
Build a clear compliance strategy which has a clear approval and blessings of the leadership. To help you cultivate a culture of Compliance seek active, vocal and visible commitment and participation by the Leadership – Management must lead by example. Secondly it will greatly help if you engage employees in the ICP instead of imposing policies on them. Participation from employees will ensure wider acceptance and success of the Program, making it easier for you to embed the culture of compliance in the organization. Lastly, you should create a Bottom Up (from New Joinees and Junior level employees) and Top Down ( from employees with long tenures in the company and Senior level employees) strategy to ensure the buy-in to Ethics and compliance is well covered across all organizational levels.
The above steps will help you establish a strong Compliance Management Program within your Organization. We hope our article helps you in your initiatives.
Conclusion
Organizations need to adopt a step-by-step approach to achieving compliance management. With the right compliance solution, companies can take control of their compliance processes and achieve a compliant status that allows them to focus on business growth in a smooth manner without legal disruptions and hassles.
Our digital compliance management platform, Compliance Cart enables our customers in an unprecedented way. Compliance Cart is transforming Compliance Management through Digitization and automation of compliance processes. Some revolutionary advantages of Compliance Cart are:
- It brings digitization and automation across various compliances by multiple Users on the single platform
- It enables collaboration between multiple Users, both Internal or External Third-party business partners that maybe working on different function, industry or region specific regulatory requirements
- It brings visibility and transparency amongst cross functional and regionally distributed compliance teams in their day to day compliance management operations
- Digitization and automation of compliance processes ensure an efficient team and effective compliance processes across the organization’s comprehensive compliance obligations
- Compliance Cart provides the organization with the critical comfort of secure exchange and storage of sensitive compliance data across internal and external business partners.
- It is imperative for an organization to get correct compliance status reports to mitigate its risks. Compliance Cart provides single-view, real-time and interactive risk-assessment and compliance status reporting of the overall compliance environment of the organization which helps the stakeholders to make informed decisions in a timely manner.
To learn how our technology platform, Compliance Cart can streamline your compliance management Contact us now.
