Ensuring the compliance of employees and associated workers is a burden for managers in every organisation. A people compliance solution in Office 365 can make a senior manager’s life very much easier.
People compliance is a relatively recent term in the technology space that differentiates itself from more established compliance terms. To date organisations have tended to focus on document management and document compliance solutions – advanced file stores. Document management tends to focus on storage and access to content but not the business outcomes of people reading the contents. The term document compliance does not focus on the people using these documents, but instead how documents are categorised and stored.
People compliance as a wider term within the RegTech field could be assigned to many niche solutions that can achieve a variety of checks, such as use artificial intelligence (AI) to test whether a person is concealing relevant historical information before being selected for a role, to background checks, to a candidate social media posts history to qualification checks. However this article focuses on people compliance as a solution with the ability to log whether an employee agrees to comply once being trained in a regulation, policy, standard or process.
People compliance in this context is regulatory technology that solves a specific compliance problem – issuing compliance content to workers or specific members of teams and then logging that people have trained, read and complied with the content of a specific policy, regulation, standard or process published directly to them by the organisation they work for. This is where the term read and comply has evolved from – a person must read and state they agree to comply. In other words your employees, agents and contractors are explicitly asked to sign digitally to state that they agree that they have read and understood the content of a compliance publication issued to them and consequently agree to comply with the terms set out therein.
The process of read and comply also takes into account any training content that is provided for each policy, to ensure that relevant understanding is obtained by the reader as part of the compliance routine.
So why Office 365? Office 365 and the take up of the Microsoft cloud has been exponential and is opening up best-of-breed RegTech solutions to organisations of all sizes and in all sectors. Microsoft corporation confirms that currently there are 180 million monthly active users of Office 365 commercial with 90% of Fortune 100 companies using Microsoft Teams. This growth of the Microsoft cloud is set to continue as more organisations move away from expensive legacy on-premise installations to proven SaaS cloud solutions.
Below we set out five key reasons why RegTech people compliance solutions such as Orchestra Read and Comply™ will make your life easier as a manager.
- Identifying compliance weaknesses fast – You will know exactly who has agreed to comply and who has not for any given compliance document. This evidence allows your organisation to address those who had not complied and refine your compliance training programme very quickly. You can quickly spot gaps or weaknesses in your compliance training and communications as part of driving a better compliance culture. The more compliant your organisation and its workforce the fewer risks.
- Evidence your compliance culture in real-time – People compliance solutions demonstrate that as a senior manager you are proactively building an active compliance culture in your organisation. This provides you with critical compliance-level evidence in real-time, which keeps you on the right side of the law with a wide range of regulations including SMCR, the Bribery Act and many others. You and the board can sleep easier at night knowing that you are offering a truly pro-active method of ensuring compliance within the teams that report to you. That’s something that the law already requires you to do and to be able to demonstrate on demand.
- Better compliance adoption– there is little point installing compliance technology that is not used on a daily basis by everyone within your organisation. History demonstrates that niche people-related technology solutions that do not integrate into a worker’s technological daily life tend to get ignored or used less frequently. If your employees are using Microsoft Office or Office 365 then it makes perfect sense to incorporate the people compliance solution into their toolset so that it becomes a daily habit and drives a habitual compliant culture. By using a people compliance solution designed for Office 365 or Azure you have placed a critical compliance tools exactly where your people already are. The adoption will therefore be far higher.
- Legal evidence and defence – although each case of potential breach is different, a properly designed people compliance solution such as Orchestra Read and Comply™ provides you with a recorded history of each employee’s compliance per policy and its published version. This provides you with a range of critical compliance evidence such as on what date and at what time a document was signed. Should a case be brought against a person for a compliance breach or as part of a larger employment issue your have information that will assist in supporting the case for the organisation.
- Reduction in risk – regulations are not there just for the sake of it. They exist to ensure your employees are following rules, rules that are designed to keep them safe, legal and to ensure your organisation is operates within the law and is ultimately successful. Regulatory authority fines for breaches can be high and damage reputations, senior managers can face legal penalties, fines and jail time. Employees can and do get hurt at work and recompense is expensive and often public domain. Using a people compliance solution is there to ensure that people work better and more effectively. If your organisation is working well, your life is going to be easier.
- Faster response to change – in any sector nothing stays the same. From the introduction of Government statute, new Acts, case law, updates to the legislation, internal policy evolution: your organisation needs to be able to adapt quickly to all of these. Markets change, mergers take place, disruptive products emerge overnight and your competitive advantage can be threatened quickly. A people compliance solution such as Orchestra Read and Comply™ ensures that updates can be sent out to all teams within your organisation ensuring that they have complied with any changes that occur as quickly as possible.
Being able to provide evidence that you and your employees are bought into a compliance-orientated culture, able to quickly adapt to changes within the workplace and industry quickly; reducing risk in the workplace and able to provide real-time evidence of a pro-active compliant workplace brings benefits to everyone. Placing a people compliance solution at the centre of where your people are already gaining great technology advantage ensures that this strategy is most likely to succeed. Most importantly of all, rather than your own in-house development overheads, you can have a complete people compliance solution installed and integrated into your existing environment in days – we think that definitely makes your life easier.
For more information on Orchestra people compliance solutions by Signarus call us on (UK) 020 7 788 9445.
