Maintaining legal compliance is a serious matter for businesses. When your company falls out of compliance, the penalties have the potential to be massive. Sanctions from compliance violations range from fines and loss of funding to bad publicity and reduced sales. If repeated violations continue, it puts departments or your entire company, at risk. Learning ways to reduce your risk for violation is critical: being proactive is key
It’s important for companies in all industries to practice risk management and reduce the likelihood of compliance violations. When creating a risk management plan, consider implementing some of the following ideas throughout the company:
Aim to hire trustworthy employees. Creating a strong, self policing environment requires hiring staff and managers who care about compliance and you can trust. Ask in interviews about employees’ experience and attitudes toward managing risk, and check in about the topic with their references.
Identify risks. You can’t take steps to minimize and manage risks without knowing what they are. Develop a task force led by a compliance representative with employee and manager volunteers, that identifies company risks and whether they’re low, medium, or high. Create a report and share findings.
Create plans for safely keeping all confidential information. Once your company identifies risks, develop plans to reduce the risk of violations. Common risk management plans include encrypting company laptops, computers, and phones, locking filing cabinets and hiding the key, and developing a confidentiality policy for all employees.
Train your staff regularly. All employees need regular refreshers around company and departmental policies, even those who don’t regularly work with confidential materials in their position. Employees should attend or take an online compliance training annually.
Contact us for help designing a custom compliance training series for your company and developing company wide risk management plans.