The world is slowly recovering from the outbreak of COVID-19 with the hope of effective vaccines. Although the remote working model remains mainstream, many businesses are reopening. This can be a challenging situation, especially for small businesses.
Australian small businesses invest a significant amount of time and money on compliance requirements every year. The coming year might also demand an upheaval of workplace compliance practices and procedures. If you are a small business that plans to reopen soon, the following tips will help you stay on top of your compliance requirements in these new conditions.
1. Enforce workplace compliance policies
Carefully articulated workplace compliance policies are the first thing that should be implemented. If you don’t already have clearly defined compliance policies, it’s time you thought about implementing them.
Workplace compliance policies guide your employees on topics such as sexual harassment, workplace bullying, code of conduct, conflicts of interest, cybersecurity, etc. Policies around workplace safety are also important to guide your employees about safe work practices to be followed to protect themself and other employees from any work health and safety incidents including infection control.
To ensure your employees understand your policies, you can provide an employee policy handbook and/or workplace compliance online training. This leads us to the next tip!
2. Provide online compliance training
Simply assuming that your premises are safe from any conduct or performance issues because all your employees are responsible adults is not a safe practice. Educating your employees about the policies in place and the standards of conduct, and work output that are expected of them helps prevent many issues. This can be achieved via handbooks or online training.
Businesses that focus on setting clear workplace guidelines are also able to educate employees through training. You should provide your employees with formal training and ensure they acknowledge their responsibilities around these policies. Providing online compliance training is emerging as an effective way to comply with this.
Whichever model you select, the importance of educating your employees about workplace compliance should not be overlooked.
3. Keep current on compliance changes
Regulations change over time and will continue to do so. You need to keep up with all regulation changes that apply to your industry.
You might need to track various state, federal or international legislative changes. Keeping current on these changes will avoid non-compliance issues, penalties and fines arising.
4. Centralise company communication
Centralising company communication is a simple but effective way of ensuring employees understand where they can find details relevant to their role and any workplace policy guidelines. Centralising communication channels helps maintain the integrity of information shared by employees compared to gathering it from other modes such as social media, texting, email, Zoom, MS Teams, etc. Regulations do require companies to mandate one medium for all official communication.
5. Implement automated HR systems to help ensure compliance
Implementing automated HR systems help streamline HR tasks such as interview scheduling, recruitment and onboarding, workplace compliance training, 360-degree employee feedback, etc. Being able to track all this information enables better compliance. This also helps avoid managing unnecessary paperwork and reduces the number of hours required to do these tasks.
In conclusion:
Small businesses can overcome compliance challenges these simple tips. If you are looking for workplace compliance policies, employee compliance training, and a comprehensive automated HR system for your business, Sentrient can help you.
This article was originally published here.