How Compliance Management Software Can Help HR Department Function Efficiently
By | Giovanni Gallo
From keeping up with constant changes in laws and regulations to straightening out internal company conduct – it is no longer possible to work around compliance today.
If corporate history has taught us anything, a single compliance hiccup is all it takes to bring the biggest giants down. Not being up-to-date with the most current regulations can thrust your business into a state of non-compliance, trigger financial, legal, and reputational damages, and ultimately damage your bottom line.
Fortunately, all it takes to keep your compliance ship sailing smoothly is equipping your HR department with solid compliance management software (CMS).
First, What Is Compliance Management Software?
Compliance management software centralizes and streamlines all processes related to compliance requirements, managing risks, deploying workflows, and everything that falls under the compliance management umbrella.
By automating all administrative tasks, creating a centralized repository of all compliance data, enhancing security, and practically making every compliance effort seamless and effortless, this software helps HR stay on top of all compliance regulations, reduce human error, enhance their operations, and maintain solid compliance organization-wide.
With the right compliance management software, you no longer have to put up with time-killing grunt work, high operational costs, and unnecessary paper trails.
What Gift Does it Bring to the HR World?
The HR department often struggles with data management to ensure the organization stays compliant at all times. By automating data procurement, communication, info-sharing, and making changes in compliance requirements easily trackable, the software transforms your organization’s compliance hiccups into your greatest strengths.
Keeps Everything Organized
Compliance management software places all business and regulatory literature within a single, centralized framework. This allows your team to track and manage all compliance-related tasks with ease. A centralized compliance monitoring system also allows your teams to collaborate with ease while removing any space for silos around compliance tasks. CMS enables every authorized team member to access specific information easily without having to dabble with countless Excel sheets. By bringing everything to the right place and making it accessible to the right people, and at the right time, CMS facilitates efficient processes and enhanced operations.
Erases Human Error
CMS automates most repetitive tasks that often make up the bulk of the compliance process. Because your team no longer has to rely on those Excel sheets (or paper notes) to track your compliance efforts, the volume of human error gets reduced significantly. In the world of compliance, even the smallest mistake can cause significant damage. With the possibility of human error now reduced, your compliance efforts don’t have to suffer simply because of an Excel hiccup.
Foster Collaboration and Nurtures Productive Communication
Because CMS offers a centralized and simplified way to observe the performance of your compliance efforts, it becomes easier for your teams to detect and resolve any inconsistencies with ease.
Thanks to CMS’s secure and simplified communication, your team communicates requirements with ease, delegates tasks with efficiency, and implements solutions quickly. This centralized system can be safely accessed by all your authorized company personnel from any part of the world so your compliance efforts never stop.
Reduces Costs
The countless efficiencies of a CMS solution contribute toward creating a more streamlined and efficient workforce. This, in turn, helps minimize costs and put resources to better use. Compliance management software also shifts your workflows to the cloud. This helps your team save tons of money that otherwise goes into storage costs and additional office space. With everything now held digitally, you no longer have to dedicate a space for filing cabinets or even spend money upgrading your on-premises servers to keep your data secure.
Saves (a Lot of) Time
As with anything, maintaining compliance involves performing several administrative tasks that are often prone to human error. By automating these time-sucking tasks, compliance management software frees up your team’s time so they can focus on other strategic tasks.
For instance, CMS’s dashboard opens a real-time window into your organization’s compliance levels and performance. The automated updates then allow your HR team to spend their time “fixing” any problems that may be slowing down your performance instead of spending their time manually tracking them.
Enables Top-Notch Customer Experience
Compliance goes beyond just adhering to regulations. When your team implements a CMS solution, they also show their eagerness to improve processes and systems to ensure customer data stays fully secure. By making your customers feel fully safe about associating with you, it allows you to build customer loyalty, alongside attracting business.
Enables Better Security
Compliance processes involve managing mountains of sensitive and confidential data and compliance management software ensures maximum security across all your workflows and processes by enabling powerful security and encryption. The software also moves your data from an onsite company source to the cloud for increased security.
When your data is stored in on-site premises, it becomes vulnerable to cyberattacks and you run the risk of valuable data getting erased for good. Moving it to the cloud, on the other hand, scatters it across several servers with CMS’s strong encryption features governing and protecting your information 24/7.
Offers Powerful Data Analysis Tools
Powerful CMS systems come equipped with smart data analysis tools and business intelligence tools to ensure your processes are quick and efficient. Tools such as reporting dashboards, charts, maps, graphs, and more allow you to spot, analyze, and mend roadblocks with ease.
These in-built tools allow HR teams to quickly identify legal and regulatory trends, make informed decisions, and steer the organization away from risks. Moreover, these tools are designed to keep your ease of access in mind. With everything in a centralized database, you can save tons of time that would otherwise go into importing files and moving between screens.
Helps Manage and Mitigate Risks
Implementing a CMS solution is synonymous with keeping risks outside your company gates. Why? Because this tool spots and mends any kinks in your processes and workflows. When errors are fixed, risks naturally get mitigated. For instance, if a new regulation breaks into the landscape, the software will notify you immediately so your decisions don’t put your organization at risk of non-compliance.
No More Paper Waste!
This one is a no-brainer, with powerful centralized software, your team no longer has to burden themselves with hefty paperwork or even those endless Excel sheets for that matter.
A Final Word
At the end of the day, the right compliance management software promotes better organization-wide compliance. Powerful automation allows HR to shift their focus to strategic decision-making instead of drowning in administrative work. A centralized structure helps teams collaborate securely and with ease. Data analysis tools help examine (and fix!) your organization’s compliance health. With the software now keeping constant track of all regulatory changes, your organization never runs the risk of slipping into non-compliance.
With countless benefits of implementing and endless risks of not implementing compliance management software, the only question worth asking is, “Has my organization taken advantage of this powerful tool?”
Resources:
https://oig.hhs.gov/newsroom/oig-podcasts/compliance-program-basics/
https://ethico.com/7-benefits-and-features-of-a-great-compliance-management-software/
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-trouble-with-corporate-compliance-programs/
https://compliance.unm.edu/resources/evaluationofcomplianceprograms.pdf
Author Bio:
Giovanni Gallo is the Co-CEO of Ethico, where his team strives to make the world a better workplace with compliance hotline services, sanction and license monitoring, and workforce eLearning software and services.
Growing up as the son of a Cuban refugee in an entrepreneurial family taught Gio how servanthood and deep care for employees can make a thriving business a platform for positive change in the world. He built on that through experience with startups and multinational organizations so ethicsLine’s solutions can empower caring leaders to build strong cultures for the betterment of every employee and their community.
When he’s not working, Gio’s wrangling his four young kids, riding his motorcycle, and supporting education, families, and the homeless in the Charlotte community.
