What is the easiest way to ensure regulatory compliance in your retail busienss?
When you have a large company it can be incredibly difficult to ensure that every aspect of your business is acting in a fully compliant way. It is a complex problem to solve because informing and educating staff about the correct way to do things is only the start. To get to the root of the issue you need to change attitudes, behaviours and create a culture which values the importance of compliance.
Implementing your policies or procedures is one thing, but actually getting staff to follow them is another. Over time it becomes more and more challenging to ensure that your staff adhere to all of them. This can lead to errors, poor quality of work and expectations not being met. This can be because staff forget their importance, they forget how to carry certain procedures out properly or they forget that a policy exists all together.
Non-compliance can lead to large financial penalties, inspections and audits, imprisonment, destroyment of a brand's value and market reputation, or your company could be shut down completely! It is vital you have an effective strategy in place, so how can you ensure compliance in the easiest way possible and avoid costly compliance mistakes? It all comes down to improving simplicity, having effective controls in place and having greater visibility for everyone in the business, not just head office.
How can I improve simplicity when it comes to compliance?
The first most simple change you can make is to simplify the language that you are using to explain your policies and procedures. If employees can’t follow or understand what you are saying then there is little chance of them adhering to them.
How to make your compliance articles easier to follow
Avoid using complex language or jargon as this will immediately disengage employees, use simple language and make them as easy to follow as possible.
Once you have written your policy or procedure try to cut it in half. Compliance articles should be kept short and succinct to keep employees engaged.
To stick to the facts and avoid unnecessary waffle, think about the what, who, how, where and when principles. What is being asked to be done?Who does this rule apply to? How are your staff going to implement the policy or procedure. Where does the rule, policy or procedure apply? When should it be carried out? See the table below for an example of how you might lay this out.
Break them down into stages with clear section titles. With Ocasta Engage, you can publish policies as a single item or break them down into several stages. This makes it easier for navigation and simple for users to follow, rather than having one mass document which is hard to digest.
Employees don't know where to look for the policies and procedures
If you asked one of your employees right now to tell you where to find specific policies or procedures would they know right away, or would they struggle to think of where or even worse not know at all!
It is essential that you structure how you are going to organise your policies and procedures, and put them in a logical order which is going to make sense to your employees.
With Ocasta Engage, you can add your articles to specific categories to keep them organised e.g. safety, compliance, loss prevention. These can then all be kept under a parent category of 'Health and safety' which can show as a tile on the dashboard. This means that your employees can get to your policies within 3 taps, it doesn't get much easier than that!
Employees do not have time to look?
Having them available on employees own mobile devices means they can view them wherever and whenever they want to.
Our search capability in the top left means employees can search any policy or procedure with immediate results.
Employees don't ever actually read the policies and procedures
To ensure your whole team are compliant you need clarification that they have read certain policies and procedures.
The acknowledgements feature on Engage means you can be notified when staff have read certain articles.
However, one acknowledgement is not always enough, sometimes you need policies to be re-acknowledged. For example, a health and safety policy may need to be read once per year but a code of conduct policy will need to be read once per month.
Engage’s frequency feature on acknowledgements means you can set how often you would like your policies and procedures to be read.
Employees forget to read policies and procedures
When employees are busy at work, the last thing they remember to do is read policies and procedures.
With Engage, you can send notifications directly to your employees mobile devices even if the app is closed. These can notify employees of when the article needs to be acknowledged by.
You can schedule policies and procedures for any time and notify employees when they are shared.
Employees can't easily report on compliance
Ocasta Review allows your staff to report people, locations and objects. They can do this in the moment, wherever they are and results will be sent straight to head office for a complete overview of compliance in your business.
Reporting on people ensures that staff are acting in accordance with your compliance regulations.
Reporting on locations ensures that all areas across your company are meeting compliance requirements and up to standard.
Reporting on things ensure all objects, materials, vehicles or equipment are meeting requirements and up to standard.
If you regularly face compliance issues, find out the five most common compliance issues and what you can do to solve them.
Measure their understanding
For some policies such as FCA compliance, a number of reviews must be carried out and recorded to make sure people understand the policy and are following it. This can be achieved via Review Checklist feature, the completion of which is automatically logged and can be reported on.
Ocasta allows you to digitally transform and radically change your business. Our platforms work together to change every facet of your organisation. Everything from operations, company documents, internal communications, and staff interactions. With Ocasta you get peace of mind that your business stays compliant, in the easiest way possible.
