HR departments play an important role in ensuring that businesses comply with regulatory requirements.
By monitoring conformance with industry-specific guidelines, guaranteeing adherence to legislation and keeping paper trails updated, HR professionals help organisations to avoid the penalties and fines that can damage or even destroy reputations.
But what about regulation relating to the HR department itself? While there are various organisations that HR practitioners can go to themselves for advice and guidance – most notably the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and ACAS – to what individual or organisation can employers turn in relation to their behaviour?
The short answer is none. There is currently no regulatory body with responsibility for ensuring that the HR industry conforms to changes in legislation or that its day-to-day activities are audited and accredited.
But there is an argument to say that, if HR is to have credibility during employment disputes and/or legal action, there is a requirement for such a body with real powers, not least to insist on the promotion and adoption of robust HR processes.
An increasingly important and growing part of the function’s remit in recent years has been to ensure that organisations stay on the right side of the law as far as workplace legislation is concerned. As well as helping to avoid tangible penalties and fines, ensuring compliance also plays a major role in keeping their employer’s reputation and brand intact.
The nature of self-regulation
Although such activity takes time and resources and adds considerably ads to the function’s administrative load, it is part and parcel of the job and, as such, unavoidable. The Government may have pledged to reduce red tape, but the volume of legislation and regulation shows no sign of abating any time soon, at least not from an HR point of view.
Due to the lack of an external regulatory body, however, accountability has to come from within and it inevitably falls to HR directors to ensure that their department is doing what it should be doing.
Such a situation is, of course, easier said than done in today’s high-pressure work environment. Because time and resources are being squeezed more than ever, some HR departments only realise that they have a compliance problem when it is all too late and they are facing a court summons or a fine.
But self-regulation is not simply about ticking boxes and being able to demonstrate the appropriate audit and paper trails when required. It is also about being proactive – a situation that relies on HR directors to ensure that the necessary workflows, processes and internal rules are in place.
These procedures and practices must be well thought through, robust and regularly monitored and reviewed in order to ensure that they remain relevant.
Before change can be affected here though, the correct educational channels must be set up to ensure that each member of the HR department stays fully abreast of any changes to legislation – which is a challenge in itself.
Keeping abreast
When the UK Bribery Act was introduced earlier this year, for instance, HR professionals were quick to distribute information informing employees of what constituted an acceptable gift and what amounted to a bribe. Similarly, because of the media attention surrounding the Agency Workers Regulations, which came into force in October, no HR person was left in any doubt about the potential impact.
But not all laws are so high-profile. This means that, as well as reacting to the blockbusters, HR practitioners must ensure that they are aware of all changes, updates and new legislative introductions as well as how they affect the workforce.
Signing up for alerts from the likes of ACAS’ news and notifications feed, for example, would constitute a minimum. But the conciliation service also stages a series of events about employment law and related issues, which can be useful, particularly if participants are asked to brief colleagues about their learnings rather than assume that the information will be absorbed via osmosis.
Having put mechanisms in place to keep on top of legislation and created the policies and procedures to respond to it, meanwhile, the next step is to ensure that the implications of any new laws are articulated to the workforce in a manner that they can understand.
Although the staff handbook has been the traditional repository of new policies and procedures, a real-time online environment provides scope to make information more timely and relevant, not least because it is no longer enough for HR departments to simply publish information and hope that employees will read and understand it.
Take the 2007 smoking ban, for example. Many companies failed to adequately explain that employees could no longer smoke in what was deemed to be a company vehicle. When reports filtered back of infringements by certain individuals, some organisations leapt straight to the disciplinary stage.
Rising to the challenge
But in fairness to the workers concerned, if the changes had not been communicated properly in the first place, how could they be expected to know how to behave?
What this means is that, rather than simply issue information, HR practitioners must take a proactive stance by holding meetings and events, whether physical or virtual, to fully explain the ramifications of any regulatory changes. Luckily, a raft of technological tools is now at their disposal to help them disseminate and reiterate key messages. These include podcasts, wikis, videos, online forums and even text messages.
Admittedly, because of the nature of the law and the level of detail involved in even minor pieces of legislation, such content is never going to be truly scintillating, but it can be brought to life by relating it to real-world events and situations that make it relevant to the lives of employees.
Too many companies still use a one-size fits all approach when, in reality, the legislation will mean different things to different people in different contexts. As a result, the HR department must cater to everyone’s needs, no matter how time-consuming an exercise it might be.
Compliance in a self-regulation context is undoubtedly a challenge for HR, but one to which the profession must rise. As well as ensuring that organisations keep – and are seen to keep – on the right side of the law, it is also a vehicle for demonstrating the function’s value to the board – something that has been on the agenda for many years.
Failure on the part of HR professionals to step up to the mark will result not only in a damaged employer brand, but also likely a damaged career.
Roger Moore is general manager of HR, payroll and time and attendance software provider, Bond Teamspirit.
