How Can You Encourage Employee Compliance?

When employees aren’t compliant, it can lead to serious and often detrimental results for a business. Noncompliance within any organization can breed a toxic and even fraudulent culture. There are also consequences that occur outside the organization as well. For example, noncompliance can create legal and financial trouble for a business.

Despite the negative consequences of noncompliance, many employers remain unsure of how to address the issue with employees. Of course, pre-employee policies such as drug and health checks (https://checkr.com/platform/screenings/drug-and-health) are also part of workplace safety standards, which many candidates avoid being compliant with. It is unlucky that many employers are not sure of the right approach to take, that can encourage or even force compliance.

The following are some things employers consider to improve organizational compliance.

Make It Easy

The easier an employer can make it for employees to be compliant, the better. One example where a lot of employees aren’t compliant with policies is T&E. Travel and expenses can represent around 10 percent of businesses’ operational budgets, however, so compliance is essential to control costs.

A solution that can improve T&E compliance is the use of travel expense management software. It can be customized to ensure employees are following company policies, and it makes things like submitting expense reports and receipts easier and faster for them.

When employees have everything they need to be compliant, and it’s efficient and easy, then they’re more likely to adhere to policies.

Ensure Policies Are Accessible

What a lot of business leaders fail to understand is that policies aren’t necessarily being broken because employees are willfully non-compliant. Instead, a lot of it comes from not knowing policies. Employees might be on-boarded and learn about company policies, but beyond that, they never hear another thing.

Make sure policies are highly accessible and visible to employees so that they can’t claim ignorance if an issue does arise.

Along with policy accessibility, employers shouldn’t forget the value of training and development. It’s not enough to train employees on compliance when they first come onboard. They need to be regularly refreshed on training, for it to be most effective. You also want to make sure they’re up-to-date on current best practices and internal policies, which may change often.

Be Proactive

Noncompliance can be cancerous in an organization. If one person or a few people are regularly noncompliant, and there seems to be no consequence, other people can start to think that it’s okay. It emboldens employees and can cause a negative cultural shift. What begins as innocent noncompliance can quickly develop into something like fraud.

Being proactive is important so that when red flags are spotted, they can immediately be addressed and resolved. A good way to be proactive in terms of compliance, especially when there are issues that can fly under the radar, is to use technology and automation to extrapolate data on the processes that are happening. Using data can help business leaders see inconsistencies or problems, even when they start small.

Finally, while many of the things on this list focus on changing or shaping the behavior of employees, as an employer you also want to review your policies related to compliance regularly. Ensure they’re not too restrictive, complicated or unnecessarily difficult to adhere to. Simple, straightforward compliance policies are going to be the most effective.

Author: Oliver Curtis

Hi there. I’m Oliver. I’m just a young boy from the outskirts of… Okay, that’s a lie, I’m not a young boy anymore, although I certainly feel that way at heart.

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