Compliance Management for Your Business

What is compliance management?

Compliance management is a process of managing the compliance risks that can arise from a company’s interactions with its customers, suppliers, partners, and other stakeholders. The goal of compliance management is to minimize the risk that a company's actions will lead to violations of business or government regulations, or otherwise adversely affect its reputation.

Compliance management includes activities such as:

1. Identifying and understanding risks, 
2. Evaluating the appropriate policies, procedures, and processes that are in place to manage those risks, 
3. Regularly evaluating those policies and procedures to make sure they are effective in meeting their goals, 
4. Implementing changes to the policies and procedures that are appropriate, 
5. Monitoring activities for compliance with policy.

You can see from the list above that Compliance Management is a cyclical process. You can't simply create compliance documents or practices one day and never review them. A repetitive process of review and improvements is needed. This will ensure that your organization keeps up to date with changes in its environment, applicable law and advances made by competitors, customers and clients.

Creating a compliance management system

A compliance system is a set of policies and procedures to ensure that the law is followed. These systems are necessary for any business to maintain a legal status, so it's important to have one in place.

When it comes to creating your compliance management system, there are a number of steps you should take:

1. Define your company's needs and goals for the compliance process. Do some research to find out what type of information is available from government and regulatory agencies.
2. Define your company's objectives and requirements of the compliance process. 
3. Create a plan for the compliance system. This needs to be documented and communicated to all employees, including supervisors, managers, human resources personnel, attorneys, and executives.
4. Implement any security measures necessary to keep confidential information secure while you create or improve upon the system.
5. Communicate to all employees the company's objectives and requirements of the compliance process. Also create a plan for communicating with any new employees who join your company.
6. Define specific training needs for all managers, supervisors, HR personnel, attorneys, and executives involved in the compliance process.
7. Develop a checklist for standard operating procedures that will be used by your compliance program.
8. Provide examples of other laws, regulations, and standards related to labor and employment law compliance that your company should be aware of.

Your compliance management system needs to cover every aspect of your business. This includes manufacture, supply, customer and client liaison, and employee management etc. The standards and required practices should be properly documented, communicated and followed.

Importance of building a solid compliance system into your organizational culture

A compliance system should be built into your organizational culture. This will ensure that employees are aware of the importance of ethics and compliance culture.

The first step is to develop a company-wide policy on ethics and compliance. This should be communicated to all employees so that they are aware of the expectations of the organization.

The second step is to create an environment where these policies are followed through with. This includes having mechanisms in place for reporting unethical behavior and consequences for offenders.

The third step is ensuring that employees have a voice in the company's decision-making process. Employees should be consulted about ethical decisions and providing with an avenue for feedback on any changes made to policies or procedures.

Throughout this whole process you need to ensure that the rules are applied to everyone in the organization. This includes senior managers. For the compliance system to be fully ingrained into the organizations culture, it must be adopted and supported by everyone.

Compliance management software

However you decide to run your compliance system, you will probably find using specialist software will make things run more efficiently.

DocRead helps ensure staff compliance by effortlessly requesting that staff read and acknowledge your compliance documents in a fully trackable process.