Rally Your Resources
You’ve got your compliance checklist. Now it’s time to review or create your organization’s compliance team. Who should be on the roster? Here are few of the key players: the individual tasked with human resource and compliance issues within your organization, your business insurance broker, your corporate legal counsel, and your accountant. These professionals can advise you on best practices and answer questions to keep your business on the right side of the law. As a bonus, many of these service providers also offer compliance training. Don’t wait until there is a claim or notice of violation. It’s vital to have your team in place before you’re in crisis mode responding to a legal issue.
Work the Network
Having strategic partners in place is imperative to a healthy organization. You can maximize your compliance effectiveness and contain expenses by augmenting your strategic partners with professional organization memberships. Associations like the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the Michigan Business & Professional Association (MBPA) and industry-specific groups provide valuable information to their members on legal and compliance issues. For example, SHRM offers a knowledge center where its members can ask HR-related questions up to 25 times per year and MBPA recently announced a toll-free employment law hotline to its members.
Like SHRM and MBPA member benefit services, many professional organization and membership sites have forums and list serves that can be terrific sources of compliance information. Search through archives (most are categorized by topic) or post your own question to the group.
Don’t overlook the third party administrators your organization uses, either. The partners who provide COBRA, FMLA and cafeteria plan administration are great compliance resources, too.
You can also look to social networking groups for best practices, advice and referrals. LinkedIn is a free business networking site with more than 80 million members. LinkedIn Answers tool features hundreds of thousands of questions and answers from its members. Members can ask questions, answer questions, as well as view and search all existing questions and answers. Organized in categories, it’s easy to search for topics related to human resources and compliance issues.
Get a Regular Check Up
You’ve created your compliance checklist, rallied your resources to develop your compliance team, and worked your network for trusted sources of information. Now that your organization is in maintenance mode, you’ll need to create your plan to regularly review current and new compliance requirements. Mark a date on your calendar every quarter to review your recordkeeping, policies, procedures and any new laws that may apply. Then, and here’s the hard part, stick to the schedule and follow through! Dedicating time, attention and resources to this key issue is the only way to tame the compliance beast.
Kelly Jackson is the president and founder of KJGroup, a human resource consulting firm headquartered in Farmington Hills, Mich. She can be reached at kjackson@kjgrouphrconsulting.com