So many companies inadvertently skip out on their compliance. Regardless of the industry, regardless of their size, they find themselves in trouble with regulation they didn’t know existed, by losing track of problems, documentation and processes that can fall out of compliance so fast that you’d blink and miss it.
The documentation is a problem on its own. It needs to be signed, sealed and delivered to the right employees at the right time, and you need to have records that can prove it. The more you have for your staff to manage and stay on top of, the more chance there is that something is going to fall through the cracks and put you into a grey area where the government is not likely to be super understanding.
And even when it’s not about the fines, and it’s not about the slap on the wrist, it’s about the reason that compliance legislation exists in the first place – actually caring for and looking after your staff to keep them safe, keep them healthy and keep them on the job in a way that is right for you and right for them.
Here are some of the common compliance areas where you could run into some issues and – what to do instead.
(Spoiler alert – you’re going to want an onboarding and HRIS system that can keep you compliant. We might know of one )
Occupational Health & Safety
This is really the one we care about the most. And that shouldn’t be surprising. Health and safety is literally our responsibility at Flare, and your responsibility at your company, and we all know that. We don’t go to bed at night trying to think about ways to cut costs on keeping our people safe, and neither does anyone else in HR.
We want to the absolute best to keep people out of harm’s way. The problem is that new technology and old methods don’t mix, new developments and ways of working and static paperwork don’t mix, and safety and obsolescence are poor partners. When you have an OH&S policy that changes and you have to find a way to get every single current employee and every new employee to fill out and read a bunch of paper forms that you’re going to try and keep in a busted up filing cabinet, you’re putting people at risk. Nobody wants that.
At Flare, we literally use our own platform to make sure that we are updating the OH&S forms all the time. As soon as they change. We talk a lot about New Onboarders and Active Onboarders, and what that basically means is new folks joining the business and reviewing docs and policies and existing employees doing the same thing.
When we moved into our new office down in Miller’s Point in a gorgeous old heritage listed building, we had to update a whole bunch of things around safety, and we could just do that once in our own paperless system, have it be uniform for everyone who’s started since, and track all the people who did the move with us to make sure they’d read and signed the papers too.
This took so much less effort for our people and culture staff, while being the best way to keep the rest of us safe and secure.
Employee & Company Policies
And it’s not just the safety stuff. It’s Leave. It’s benefits. It’s salary. It’s comp. It’s every single thing that’s easy to forget about, but can absolutely bite you in the long run. When your policies change around diversity for example, you have to be able to get everybody on board. At Flare, we’re one of the first technology companies in Australia to implement a gender transition policy to support our transgender staff, and creating and updating that policy was incredibly easy to do through the platform.
When people start at Flare, before they’ve even had their first day on the job, they’ve been through the forms that they need to know that they’ll be supported in the workplace, and that we expect them to support the other people on their team in the same way. If we weren’t able to do that, we’d be put in danger of running afoul of compliance around diversity, equality and inclusion – and more importantly, we’d be doing a bad job of looking after our people and being there for them, and that’s something that’s incredibly important to every one of us.
If any other rules change for the workplace, or for your company, you can literally put yourself in the best position to deal with them and keep your compliance up to date by centralising your forms, documents and policies and making sure people aren’t using out of date paper forms that don’t reflect the truth of your actual policies.
Privacy & Security
At Flare, we’ve obviously gone through all the processes to be security certified so that we can be compliant with requirements from the government and from our clients around cybersecurity. We don’t play fast and loose with technology, privacy or security, and we have the policies in place to prove it. We maintain those policies regularly, we keep them switched on, and we know that we aren’t in danger of losing it.
The truth is that government regulations do actually change around this stuff. Because tech changes, privacy changes and the lawmakers are going to change with it, and people who don’t pay attention or stay on top of it are going to wind up with a fine on their hands.
We don’t think that compliance should be your headache, and we don’t think it should be something that you dread or try and get out of. We’d say that only hurts you, but the truth is, it hurts everyone in your organisation, bar none. And it’s a damn shame if it gets in the way of your wider goals. If you bring in an onboarding platform, it actually does make a difference and it does allow you to streamline everything.
It doesn’t have to be Flare. It could be any onboarding platform. They’re all going to help with this problem. But we do believe ours is the best you’re going to find, and we’ll stake our claim on that, and we’re proud of it. And if you’re worried about compliance, no hard sell – just get in touch. Download some of our content, and we’ll reach out, or book in a demo!
