HR departments are responsible for many different pieces of the employment process. In addition to handling hiring and payroll, HR is responsible for protecting employees and the overall business. Knowing the rights and legal compliance issues that affect employees and employers alike is key to a successful HR responsibility.
When it comes to compliance and operating legally, the Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO), as head of the HR operation, has a lot of HR compliance responsibilities.
How can CHRO’s increase in HR compliance?
Here are the things that HR should know when it comes to creating and establishing tasks and to-dos that ensure better company compliance.
1. Lead by example
One of the biggest ways to encourage compliance across the whole company is to make sure that leadership isn’t just talking the talk, but also walking the walk. It’s important that employees can see executives including the CHRO living out the kinds of things they want to see in employees – non-discrimination, workplace safety, and more. Compliance is largely understood and tracked by HR departments, but it’s important that every employee knows that there are guidelines that everyone is responsible for following, and seeing the leadership buy into that and embody those responsibilities is helpful in getting employees motivated.
2. Know the rules
Understanding what your HR compliance responsibilities are is the biggest piece of being able to drive compliance. You can’t adhere to the laws if you don’t know what they are. Understanding compliance, however, can be tricky or even just overwhelming. Depending on your industry, there are dozens of sets of compliance rules to track, including employment laws, privacy practices, safety mandates, and more. If this falls outside the scope of your expertise, consider hiring a compliance manager who can audit, track, and enforce compliance across your organization. You may also choose to work with a HR support organization that specializes in compliance and can help manage your HR compliance responsibilities. If you choose to bring on more compliance quality control employees or you choose to outsource your auditing and compliance planning to a third-party, it’s an investment worth making, as the legal expenses and reputation costs associated with non-compliance can be extremely high.
3. Treat training as a priority
Many employment compliance laws relate to hiring, firing, and paying employees. This isn’t something most of your staff has to worry about. But other compliance issues – such as workplace safety, discrimination, harassment, and more can be helped along by the entire workforce. Making sure that training is a regular occurrence in your workplace – for both on and off-site employees – can help reduce your compliance risk. Mandatory training may never be anyone’s favorite way to spend time in the office, but it’s important to make sure that your employees are engaging with it anyway, for both their safety and the protection of the company as a whole.
4. Keep an open door
Leaders are busy people, so CHRO’s aren’t always available for questions or discussions, but having time to answer questions or delegating that responsibility to someone else (maybe an HR manager or director) can help make sure that compliance responsibilities don’t fall through the cracks because someone doesn’t have the right information or has questions that go unanswered. Having an open door policy – or at least a policy that encourages questions and communication – can help enhance your compliance.
These HR compliance responsibilities are suggestions to help increase your overall rate of HR compliance. They can also help increase your human resources efficiency, as you have a set of guidelines for how to encourage adoption of important policies and can spend less time tackling compliance to-dos one by one. With a more educated workforce and dedicated compliance resources, you’re more likely to see better compliance results all the way around
