HR teams have a wide range of tasks to complete day-to-day, including helping the business keep up with various compliance standards. This can be challenging to manage, considering HR department resources are often already maxed with hiring, payroll, and benefits administration processes.
Compliance management becomes even more challenging, however, as new legislation is introduced that requires the business to adjust its policies surrounding data management or hiring practices, both of which can take considerable time to understand and implement.
However, designing and implementing important compliance across the organization shouldn’t and doesn’t have to be a continuous drain on your HR teams. By following specific strategies, you can minimize the disruption to compliance management while ensuring consistent policy adherence.
What Causes Compliance Fatigue?
While HR teams may initially put a lot of effort into compliance management across the organization, oftentimes, fatigue can set in. This can be caused by a number of factors, including:
Constantly Changing Regulations
It’s rarely easy in operational settings for compliance regulations to remain static. Most of the time, HR teams can feel like they’re always trying to hit a moving target, with new initiatives becoming a key priority or compliance requirements shifting throughout the year.
When the HR department spends a significant amount of time developing new procedures only to find that they need to be revised six months after they’re created, this can lead to fatigue. This is especially the case when these new changes also necessitate modifications to policies, company handbooks, and supporting workflows to support them.
Information Overload
As compliance rules shift, it can be challenging to keep pace with understanding new regulations and their implications for the business. These updates then need to be communicated effectively across all teams, which is a rarely easy task.
It can take a lot of time to absorb and translate important details surrounding new policies or compliance initiatives. This not only becomes taxing for HR teams, but also for the individuals responsible for implementing new departmental changes based on the new information they receive.
Resource and Staffing Gaps
Not every company has a fully-staffed HR department. More often, these departments are made up of smaller teams responsible for handling a range of tasks, including meeting ACA reporting deadlines, keeping payroll up-to-date, and caring for staff recruitment.
When you add demanding compliance management responsibilities on top of their already full plate, it can be overwhelming. The hours required to manage regulations can quickly eat into the time they need to handle other essential work, stretching their capacity to the limit.
Manual Processes and Outdated Systems
Relying on old platforms and manual efforts makes it incredibly difficult for HR professionals to keep up with compliance changes. When departments rely on using outdated software or organizing data by hand, there’s no room to automate key processes.
This lack of automation not only slows your HR team down but also opens the door for more human error, significantly increasing the risk of missing critical regulatory requirements.
Strategies to Prevent and Overcome Compliance Fatigue
Embed Compliance into Company Culture
To keep compliance management processes from feeling like a burden, keep them as part of your daily operations. Frame compliance as an essential part of your company culture and its ability to grow, not simply another administrative function.
By explaining the “why” behind each compliance initiative it helps to show the reasoning behind new processes, workflow changes, or departmental priority shifts. When your team better understands their purpose, getting their cooperation is much easier.
To support this effort, ensure that your HR teams provide clear documentation surrounding new compliance policies and are actively involved in implementing them. This minimizes confusion and helps with company-wide adoption.
Leverage Technology and Automation
Overly manual processes are one of the most common culprits of burnout when handling business compliance initiatives. If HR teams constantly need to go back and forth between systems or they’re constantly juggling other tasks like managing employee benefits or payroll administration, it creates a heavy workload and increases the risk of errors.
Having the right technology in this regard can be a game-changer. For example, best-of-breed BenAdmin (Benefits Administration) platforms can centralize all benefits data and automate a wide range of employee management tasks. They streamline elements like open enrollment and new hire onboarding while also helping to handle eligibility tracking. These systems and others like them reduce unnecessary administrative burden and free up your HR team to focus on more important tasks.
Keep HR and Staff Proactively Informed
Keeping both your HR teams and employees informed on the various industry compliance requirements applicable to your business is important for avoiding confusion and burnout. A good place to start these initiatives is by encouraging your HR team to subscribe to government portals and industry publications to get up-to-date information and alerts on important legislation or regulatory changes that could impact the business.
When new information arrives, share it openly so all employees understand how the rules affect their daily roles. Networking with contacts from other companies and forming ongoing discussion groups is another way to gain practical advice on implementing new changes, ensuring that nothing slips through the cracks.
Conduct Routine Compliance Audits
To prevent compliance needs from becoming too disruptive throughout the year, make regular internal audits a standard practice. These evaluations help your HR team to proactively discover and fix any non-conformance issues before they escalate into bigger problems.
By scheduling time to review your operational procedures against industry standards, HR teams can become more proactive regarding important policy changes, staffing requirements, and legal compliance areas. This avoids needing to become overly reactive when more significant compliance changes are required and can help to avoid potential fines or legal issues by inadvertently falling into non-compliance territory.
Create More Efficient Compliance Management Processes for Your Business
Staying on top of business compliance is an important aspect of an organization’s long-term success. By recognizing the areas that contribute to compliance fatigue and introducing the strategies discussed to combat it, you’ll help your HR teams to reduce their manual workloads, along with the burnout that can come with it.
Author Bio: Frank Mengert
Frank Mengert continues to find success by spotting opportunities where others see nothing. As the founder and CEO of ebm, a leading provider of employee benefits solutions. Frank has built the business by bridging the gap between insurance and technology-driven solutions for brokers, consultants, carriers, and employers nationwide.
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