Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Risk Management and Compliance - Implementation Toolkit (Excel workbook). The Risk Management and Compliance Implementation Toolkit includes a set of best-practice templates, step-by-step workplans, and maturity diagnostics for any Risk and Compliance related project. Please note the above partial preview is ONLY of the Self Assessment Excel Dashboard, referenced in [read more]
The Best Ways to Keep Up to Date with Business Compliance
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Business rules and regulations change often, and if you don’t pay close attention, you could miss out on the important changes that could affect your company. Remember, failure to comply could lead to financial losses and a ruined reputation. Here are some of the best ways to keep up with these changes.
What Is Business Compliance?
Compliance means conforming to business rules or obligations set out by law, both internally and externally. It also requires ensuring that your workforce is following the laws and regulations. Enforcing compliance helps businesses prevent and detect violations, keeping the organisation protected from expensive fines and lawsuits.
Compliance should be an ongoing process. In fact, some organisations have established some programs that will allow them to govern their compliance policies consistently and accurately over time.
Why Is Business Compliance Important?
Several businesses find it difficult to meet business compliance requirements. But they should understand that business compliance is important since every company must conduct its business according to the necessary laws, rules, and regulations set by the government. Non-adherence to business laws or regulations could lead to criminal charges, which no business would ever want to deal with. Besides, the government’s main reason for implementing these laws is to protect your business.
Business compliance can help build a better team since everyone will follow the same guidelines and be on the same page. By ensuring that all departments and staff are working together to maintain certain standards, you can minimise the risk of failures and costly violations.
An effective business compliance program also improves communication between the staff and business leaders. The program should include a process for distributing, updating, and tracking compliance policies. Remember, you cannot hold the employees responsible for not abiding by rules and regulations they know nothing about!
How You Can Implement Business Compliance
When implementing business compliance, companies should create a comprehensive compliance strategy. The strategy should be integrated into all the compliance efforts across the organisation, from external regulations to internal policies and comprehensive staff training.
The most important step in a business compliance strategy is drafting the policies and procedures. You cannot expect your employee to understand the law, let alone adhere to them if they do not clearly understand these laws. So, create clear guidelines that can help every department, and ultimately, everyone in the organisation to understand business compliance.
Although the legal department is usually responsible for crafting the procedures and policies, they must collaborate with other departments to gather input on how the proposed measures could affect the employees and company operations.
Once you have drafted the procedures and policies, the next step is to provide online business compliance training courses to employees. The program could vary from one department to another. Although coming up with comprehensive training on business compliance might seem tedious, the success of your business compliance strategy depends on how effective the training is. Remember that at the end of the day, the company will bear the consequence of noncompliance and not the employees.
Excel workbook
The Risk Management and Compliance Self Assessment will make you a Risk Management and Compliance domain expert by:
1. Reducing the effort in the Risk Management and Compliance work to be done to get problems solved
2. Ensuring that plans of action include every Risk Management and Compliance [read more]
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About Shane Avron
Shane Avron is a freelance writer, specializing in business, general management, enterprise software, and digital technologies. In addition to Flevy, Shane's articles have appeared in Huffington Post, Forbes Magazine, among other business journals.
