Nowadays, businesses have to deal with too many regulations to count and are required to comply with all of the laws and guidelines. New regulations come out every year, so it can be hard to keep up with them all and stay compliant while still performing all of your business operations.
While compliance can be complicated and expensive, it’s necessary. Organizations spend $5.47 million on compliance, which is much less when compared to an average of $14.82 million for non-compliance.
Here are a couple of tips on how you can ensure your business remains compliant.
Protect customer data
Customer data is one of your organization’s most precious assets; whether you’d like to admit it or not, your business depends on it. You need to know how to protect that data and also be aware of what data privacy protection laws mean for your business.
Data privacy and protection are no joke, especially if you have to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). And if you want to take customer data protection seriously, here are a couple of ways you can do that:
- Only collect and store important data. Try to only collect the data that is vital to your efforts and use it for business purposes. This will help you decrease the external value your data has to hackers while also improving customer confidence.
- Limit employees’ access to data. Not all of your employees need access to the data you collect. If you limit the data access you give to employees, you are creating less vulnerable points for the organizations and decreasing the chances of an internal data leak or data abuse.
- Store your data on the cloud. There are a lot of different ways to store data, but one of the most popular and safest ways to store data is on the cloud. Find a good cloud storage solution with a plethora of security features that will ensure your data is always safe.
But it’s important to note that you can never be too careful with data, and no matter how hard you try, data breaches can happen when you least expect them. But if you hire cyber security services, you can rest assured they will take all the necessary precautions to keep your customer data safe.
Workplace compliance
If you want to provide your employees with a good workplace experience and avoid any lawsuits and/or disgruntled employees, you need to think about workplace compliance. Whether this compliance is related to legal regulations or company rules, everyone in the organization needs to follow it.
Ensuring workplace compliance can be difficult, but as long as you create and foster a culture where compliance is something everyone takes seriously and respects, you won’t have anything to worry about.
If you want to ensure workplace compliance, here’s how to do it:
- Respect employment and labor laws. It’s vital that your HR employees are well-versed in all federal and state laws regarding employment and labor. This includes wage and hour laws, nondiscrimination laws, and scheduling requirements, just to name a few.
- Document all policies and procedures. If you want your employees to comply with all policies and procedures, you need to ensure they know what they are in the first place. Document them in a handbook that will be easily accessible to all employees.
- Perform compliance audits. Once you have all of your compliance processes and systems in place, perform scheduled audits to see how well the organization is keeping up with the rules and regulations.
However, things are a bit different if you have a team of freelancers. A lot of business owners and managers think it’s nearly impossible to ensure workplace compliance when not all of the employees are under the same roof, but it doesn’t have to be. In this case, you need a proven freelance management system that will allow you to ensure workplace compliance, simplify your workflow, and do much more with your freelance team.
Work with a professional lawyer
Whenever someone talks about laws and regulations businesses need to comply with, one thing you always hear is that these laws are constantly changing. Even if you knew all of the laws when you started your business, if you didn’t keep up with the changes, you probably don’t know everything there is to know now.
To solve this issue, you can either stay on top of the changing laws and regulations, which is a hard and time-consuming task or work with a professional lawyer. If you have the budget for it, hiring a lawyer is always the better choice.
Your lawyer will be with you as your business grows and develops, perform legal check-ups, and find even the smallest errors anyone but a professional would miss. As much as 50% of organizations said they spend 6-10% of their revenue on compliance costs. Overall, in the long run, hiring a lawyer is much more affordable than paying the fines that come with non-compliance.
Final thoughts
Non-compliance in the business world is no joke. If your business isn’t compliant, regardless of whether it was by accident or intentional, that can lead to huge fines, a loss of customer trust, and the company could go under. So be smart, stay on the right side of the law, and always be compliant, no matter what.
Founder Dinis Guarda
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