How Can HR and Compliance Align Without Overstepping or Duplicating Work?
- Blaise Stanicic
- Sep 2
- 2 min read
Question: My company's HR team has been given some recent directives and have come to the compliance team for help, as their goals are similar to that of the compliance team. How can we align our department directives to ensure that we are not overstepping, but also that we are not doubling our workload.
Answer:
What a great question! It is becomingly increasingly clear that compliance obligations are expanding and thus aligning with the obligations of other departments more often. Suddenly, risks regarding working with third parties becomes a data security risk, a contracts risk, and a compliance risk all at one time. So, what can be done to help all of your departments to synchronize your efforts?
Start by meeting with each of these departments to determine procedures. There are likely processes within other teams that can embed compliance processes as well. For example:
Onboarding questionnaires - add in questions that can align with compliance obligations to reduce the number of questionnaires required
Policies and attestations - consider using one system, like an LMS for example, for employees or third parties to read policies and attest to all at once, in one place, so that HR and other teams can reduce the time chasing for documentation
Align training timelines - it might make sense to create a "training week" at your company. Develop a theme for the week to launch all eLearning together. Build out a fun activity when training is completed and hand out snacks. For remote workers, send coffee shop e-gift cards when training has been completed. Hand out prizes for "top scorers" and/or mention them in a company newsletter. This could help to make training fun and more engaging, and ensure that all training goals are met at one time, avoiding overlapping with busy times for the financial team, sales team, etc.
Simple steps can help all of your compliance goals to align with other departments and reduce the time spent on administrative tasks, allowing all teams to focus on more important and pressing matters.
Blaise Stanicic
Associate Director, Compliance Training, TRACE