Compliance is a pain

Hold on there. Let’s back up and talk about what “compliance” is: Understanding your role in compliance and staying ahead of regulations is challenging, but it’s infinitely preferable to the fines and other costs associated with non-compliance.

Creating a culture of compliance in your organization, even if it’s just you, isn’t something that you can deal with in the future, or assume is the domain of only larger organizations. In the current business climate, every organization, regardless of size, is held accountable for compliance, and regulators are examining compliance plans and policies more closely than ever.

Industries can be divided into two categories: the heavily regulated and the less heavily regulated. We all know the ones buried under the most paperwork: healthcare, manufacturing, food, transportation, financial services and energy.

For those companies, compliance is core to their very survival. But even if you’re not working in one of those industries, you still have a lot of laws and regulations to follow. Compliance covers nearly every aspect of your business.

You can’t outsource all of it, because that would require outsourcing the very operation of your company. But you can do this: Find experts in the field of risk assessment, covering areas like:

* anti-bribery,

* whistleblower retaliation,

* data privacy,

* cyber security,

* workplace harassment,

* anti-competition,

* product safety, and much more.

Then pay for an assessment. You’ll find out where your compliance structure is weakest — or at worst, nonexistent.

Given the Data Privacy Law and its implementation, one area that deserves special attention is HR compliance.

Perhaps the most important step toward maintaining compliance is remaining informed and staying abreast of the always changing regulatory environment. Staying in the know and taking proactive steps to stay ahead of changes is the best way to avoid being caught unaware, and to ensure that your planning is in line with the most current applicable regulations.

As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and nowhere is that more true than in compliance management. Again, monitoring your compliance protocols now is much easier, and less costly, than dealing with an audit and fines later.

Your compliance monitoring efforts should not only closely monitor all of your startup’s messages across channels, including digital, print and sales or contact centers to ensure they meet compliance guidelines, but you also need to look beyond your compliance with consumer and marketing guidelines. You must ensure that you are adhering to best practices, particularly when collecting consumer data.

As you collect data from consumers, you are responsible for maintaining the privacy and security of that data, which means you need to invest in an assessment of your systems and maintain specific data access and protection policies. One only needs to look to some of the major consumer data breaches in recent history to understand the importance of ensuring that any data collected for any purpose be as protected as possible.

Ideally, your business compliance management plans should allow you to easily audit your activities and messages to ensure compliance, and easily identify possible issues before the regulatory agencies do.

Whatever you do, don’t dismiss compliance. What may seem trivial to you in terms of a regulation can come back to bite you in the form of costly fines and lawsuits from employees or customers. And it can happen in ways you’d have never anticipated. (Data theft of customer information? Guess what could have solved that?) Compliance is a pain, yes, but it’s just another cost of doing business.

If you need assistance, let me know; we have teams in place that can help you. Email me under Schumacher@eitsc.com