Ado you feel frustrated as a business owner or manager because your instructions aren’t always followed? Or that you implement policies nobody reads despite spending all your time documenting procedures and conducting compliance training for employees? If this is your predicament, then you must take a step back to evaluate your current approach.
Read on as we share ways you can maintain workplace compliance as an employer.
- Document Policies and Procedures
If something is critical to your company’s success, then it must be documented in the employee handbook. Understandably, documenting policies, and even creating them from scratch, sounds overwhelming for an employer. After all, you want your policy language to be flawless!
However, your employee policies and procedures don’t need to be sophisticated. The fact is, your policies and procedures don’t need to be too sophisticated. The crucial part is having documentation, which you can continually tweak over time.
- Apply the Policies and Procedures Consistently
Your policies and procedures must be implemented from the top down, with everyone in the company expected to adhere to them. There should be no special treatment! If the rules don’t apply to everyone equally, then your entire team won’t be taking the rules seriously.
Set expectations for consistency by regularly reviewing your policies with the entire staff yearly.
- Remove Compliance Barriers
Unless everyone has access to policies and procedures, your staff won’t take them seriously. You must ensure everyone from your team will have a digital or physical copy of the rules available and that everyone takes time to read them.
Reinforce your policies with checklists as well. If a practice or procedure requires a certain order of steps, then a written checklist can help reinforce the importance of performing the entire process properly.
- Training is Key
Reinforce compliance by providing compliance training courses regularly. The more familiar your employees are with what is expected of them, then the less likely they are to make mistakes.
You’ll also want to eliminate the stigma of compliance failure by transforming negatives into positives during your employee training. Let’s say your company missed an important deadline. If that happens, you can do this instead:
- Address the issue rather than brush it under the rug. Send the notice out despite it being late.
- Don’t bother blaming any team or department responsible for the fault. Rather, train the team on the procedure and seek input from the affected employees on how to avoid issues like that from happening again.
When focusing on the positive side of things, you might just discover newer and better solutions you haven’t considered!
- Stay Updated with Laws and Regulations
Compliance entails continually and consistently reviewing the current compliance environment and updating any practices and processes based on new and ever-changing laws and regulations. This is one of the most important ways to stay compliant because laws never stay the same!
Wrapping It Up
Follow these simple tips and you can get your employees to be compliant for your company’s success.
