Compliance Awareness Presentation: 7 Steps To Follow

Compliance awareness presentations can help in improving workplace culture. Keeping the business compliant entails ensuring that personnel is properly trained on a range of critical compliance topics, such as safety, harassment regulations, age and pregnancy discrimination, and so on. A firm can be held accountable for the actions of its workers who engage in unethical behavior, which could result in financial penalties and unwanted public scrutiny. To defend itself against such claims, the corporation must show that it took adequate and effective steps to avoid any wrongdoing.

How to Make a Compliance Awareness Presentation in the Workplace?

Every year,  compliance costs are claimed to account for 6-10% of revenue in 50% of firms. Hence, there is a dire need to make compliance presentations and awareness mandatory in the workplace. Here are some strategies to make a great compliance awareness presentation. 

1. Document the rules

Making sure everyone in the organization is aware of the policies and processes is the first step toward achieving workplace compliance. It is critical to have the company's regulations documented in the employee handbook. Fewer than three-quarters of businesses (69%) use technology to support their compliance efforts. 

In fact, this approach will not only provide everyone with a document to review their rights and responsibilities, but it will also function as a compliance tool if someone violates business policies. Employees can sign off on obtaining and reading their handbooks. Employers can also use checklists to ensure that employees understand all of the processes involved in a particular procedure.

2. Apply policies and procedures consistently

It is critical to ensure that the policies and processes are applied consistently throughout the firm so that no one is given preferential treatment. Employees will be far less inclined to buy into the rules if they sense that they are not applied fairly. This dissatisfaction might rapidly turn into non-compliance. 

The simplest method to avoid this problem is to emphasize the importance of these policies and processes to everyone. Having regular handbook reviews with the entire employees, where the employer goes over essential regulations and business culture, reinforces that it takes everyone's buy-in.  

3. Reinforce training 

The first step is to ensure that all employees have completed their compliance training. Employees must pay attention to their behavior and actions throughout the year to foster compliance. Compliance can be aided by providing training reinforcement.

• To reinforce learning points, send out email reminder quizzes. 
• As a reminder, place visual indicators throughout the workspace. This could include things like safety posters and courteous workplace fliers posted in common places.
• Managers might go through critical subjects in team meetings to reinforce the company's messages.
• Allow staff to learn on their own time, so they may return to any training classes as needed.

Training will assist in reinforcing compliance procedures and standards, reducing the likelihood of errors. The following topics should be covered throughout these training sessions.

• Policies, objectives, and processes relating to safety and health.
• Functions of the safety program.
• Any queries or concerns concerning the program.
• How to report potential risks, accidents, illnesses, and near-misses
• The action of the employee in case of an emergency.
• Training should also be a continuous process rather than a one-time event. 

4. Educate on the benefits of diversity

Companies with a diverse workforce are 15% more likely to outperform industry average financial results. Training on how to avoid prejudice and the protected classes should not be the end of it. More and more companies are placing a high value on diversity, but they rarely explain why this is a good thing. As a result, individuals recognize the distinctions that diversity brings, but they do not even comprehend why those differences should be embraced and appreciated. 

Along with the advantages of diversity, workplace empathy in the company must be promoted. While diversity encourages innovation and creative problem-solving, it can also lead to miscommunication among staff. Only social knowledge obtained through empathy may overcome these obstacles.

5. Make it enjoyable 

Although most compliance subjects are serious, the employers may nevertheless make them enjoyable. People despise compliance training because they feel reprimanded the entire time, so they must find ways to be innovative and upbeat. One approach to achieve this is to mark specific "awareness" days and use those occasions to initiate crucial discussions. Here are a few to consider:

• National Burn Awareness Week (first week of February)
• Black History Month (February)
• Ladder Safety Month (March)
• National Work Zone Awareness Week (April)
• National Electrical Safety Month (May)
• Pride Month for LGBTQ+ community (June)
• National Disability Employment Awareness Month (October)

6. Make sure all employees follow the policies 

One of the most challenging components of running a firm is ensuring that personnel follow policies and procedures because policies are meaningless if they are not followed by everyone. This is particularly relevant when policies are altered. Employees are more inclined to ignore a change if it affects their daily routine. Involving HR is crucial to getting employees to follow processes. HR can assist in the implementation of the changes and ensure that processes run smoothly for everyone.

• Convey firm policies and procedures to all employees in a variety of methods.
• Make sure the employees understand why they are doing what they are doing.
• Explain why a change in procedures, regulations, or rules was made.

7. Understand the responsibilities and obligations as an employee

You are responsible for the health and safety of your clients/customers, contractors, and employees in the workplace as an employer. As a result, it is critical to understand the major responsibilities and obligations, which include but are not limited to: 

• Identifying and addressing all occupational health and safety issues, as well as putting in place methods to address and control them.
• For the staff to operate, provide, and maintain safe machinery, tools, equipment, materials, and so on.
• Maintain a suitable working environment by providing and ensuring heating, cooling, ventilation, and workplace layout. 
• Make sure they are covered by workers' compensation insurance.

Employees should get training and instruction to help them understand their workplace responsibilities for their own and other employees' health and safety.

What Topics Must be Included?

The list of modules may differ based on the nature of a company's activity and the risks associated with the industry in which it works, but the following are the common compliance topics:

• Bribery and corruption prevention: This can be done by reviewing the company’s policies, offering anti-bribery training, and checking financial transactions. Corruption puts the company in jeopardy, and this is important as consumers are evaluating the ethical standards of the companies with which they choose to spend their money.

• Money laundering prevention: This includes knowing your consumers, software filtering, imposing holding periods, standardizing systems, improving searches with technology, etc. 

• Protection of personal information: Employers can ensure that personal information is protected by encrypting with strong passwords, keeping the documents safe and secure. Best practices must be followed for digital safety.

• Antitrust laws: An agreement between competing companies to limit or fix the terms of employment for potential workers may be illegal under antitrust laws if it restricts individual firm decision-making on pay, salaries, perks, employment terms, or even job opportunities. Human resources experts are frequently in the best position to guarantee that their companies' employment procedures are compliant with antitrust laws. 

• Making a non-compliance report: Non-compliance cases must be reported to the higher authorities as soon as they are discovered under the responsibility of the supervisors. 

In a Nutshell

In today's fast-changing and complex regulatory world, it is more necessary than ever to take an informed approach to business planning that complies with all current laws and corporate regulations. While no employee intentionally defies the law, compliance failures are most often caused by a lack of knowledge and understanding. That is why compliance training is so important to a company's long-term viability and profitability.