As of the mid-2020s, the typical organisation in the UK needs to adhere to all manner of legal provisions, regulations, and guidelines – some broadly applicable to UK employers in general, and others sector-specific. It all adds up to a compliance landscape that has arguably never been more complex than it is now.
Such complexity contributes to a variety of frequent pain points, such as the need to navigate overlapping regulations, as well as to deal with the stress of both internal and external audits. It also doesn’t help that many employers in the UK are still overly dependent on often inefficient, inaccurate, and outmoded manual systems.
For these reasons, if you are a key decision-maker for an organisation, you may be interested in learning more about how well-chosen software can help transform your compliance approach from reactive to proactive.
What are employers legally required to comply with in the UK?
Below are some of the principal legal frameworks that businesses and organisations up and down the UK are expected to achieve compliance with:
- The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974
- The Employment Rights Act 1996
- The Data Protection Act 2018 (complementing the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR)
- The Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012
- The legionella guidelines, as set out by the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE)’s Approved Code of Practice (ACOP) and guidance document under the L8 series code, and the accompanying technical guidance document under the HSG274 series code
Additional to these provisions, UK employers also need to be mindful of sector-specific rules issued by relevant bodies such as the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and the Department for Education (DfE). These requirements and guidelines touch on areas ranging from the environment to food safety and building safety.
What are the core areas of workplace compliance?
There are various aspects of UK employers’ operations where the need exists to adhere to often stringent legal rules and guidelines. These include:
- Health and safety, including in relation to risk assessments, safety audits, and emergency procedures
- Data protection, encompassing such elements as consent, retention, and the handling of access requests
- Facilities and estates, covering accessibility as well as the management of risks like asbestos, fire, and legionella
- Finance aspects such as payroll, tax, and reporting
- Sector-specific areas – for example, with regard to safeguarding in schools, or clinical waste in hospitals.
What steps should you take to ensure workplace compliance?
Pursuing the following actions will enable your organisation to keep on the right side of applicable regulations and standards, while minimising risks and creating a culture of compliance:
- Understand the legal framework
Firstly, you will need to determine which laws apply to your organisation, accounting for such factors as its size, sector, and activities.
- Conduct regular risk assessments
Another fundamental element of your organisation’s compliance approach will need to be the identification, logging, and control of risks across operations, such as those in relation to fire, legionella, and asbestos.
- Develop and review policies and procedures
The policies and procedures that you devise for your organisation will need to be clear and easy for all affected individuals to understand. They will also need to be aligned with current legal requirements, and regularly reviewed and updated to ensure this remains the case.
- Train your team thoroughly
Regular, role-specific training on such vital aspects as general health and safety (H&S) practices, the management of data, safeguarding, and compliance procedures, will help make sure there are no “weak links” among your personnel.
- Foster a culture of compliance
From the top levels of your organisation – where leaders will need to voice and demonstrate their commitment to compliance – right through to keeping other employees engaged and maintaining open communication channels, it will be vital to dedicate your organisation to achieving, and maintaining, adherence to all relevant rules.
- Monitor, audit, and improve
Through such measures as continuous internal monitoring, maintaining digital checklists, and ensuring constant readiness for external inspections, you can help keep your organisation proactive in its efforts to achieve, preserve, and improve compliance.
- Maintain accurate and centralised records
When evidence for every key compliance task is kept in one place – encompassing such details as who did it, when, and what happened – this can greatly minimise the scope for confusion, doubt, or dispute. For many organisations, that “one place” can, of course, be a cloud based system like Vision Pro Software.
- Stay updated on legislation and best practice
Investing in digital platforms that incorporate automated alerts and industry-specific updates, can further guard against the risk of your organisation falling out of compliance with the latest ever-changing legal requirements and guidelines.
How compliance software like Vision Pro Software supports these steps
As an all-in-one platform covering fire, legionella, asbestos, building compliance, and audit management, Vision Pro Software can be a vital tool for your organisation.
Our cloud-based software can help your organisation through the aforementioned compliance steps, thanks to its incorporation of features such as:
- Automated task scheduling
- Real-time dashboards and alerts
- Contractor and user access control
- Mobile-friendly inspections and reporting
We have built Vision Pro Software to be aligned with UK regulations and tailored to the distinctive needs of multi-site organisations.
What are the benefits of a digital compliance approach?
If your organisation in the UK has long used paper-based and/or manual systems for the management of its compliance responsibilities, you might still be unsure as to why you should shift to an entirely digital approach.
The answer is that doing so could enable your organisation to unlock a range of advantages, including:
- Reduced risk: with your compliance efforts based on a digital platform such as Vision Pro Software, you can greatly minimise the scope for legal breaches and accidents.
- Efficiency: the replacement of paperwork with automated workflows can significantly help your organisation get more done, faster, when it comes to compliance.
- Visibility: digital solutions like our own can equip your personnel to track compliance performance and status at your organisation in real time.
- Audit readiness: the right cloud-based compliance software can give your staff – as well as anyone else who needs to see and review such resources, from inside or outside your company – instant access to relevant policies, logs, and evidence.
- Savings: an efficient, sophisticated, and automatically updated digital compliance software package can enable your organisation to avoid regulatory fines and reduce administrative overhead.
Sector spotlights: how this works in practice
So, you now know the theory of how a digital platform such as Vision Pro Software can support compliance across your organisation.
Now, here are some of the “real-world” ways in which those benefits can manifest, depending on your organisation’s industry:
- Education: a digital compliance approach can help your institution with various aspects of DfE compliance, building safety, and asset tracking across campuses.
- Healthcare: for ensuring alignment with CQC regulations, and standards for medical equipment and water safety, the above digital compliance steps can be invaluable.
- Estate and property management: a platform like Vision Pro Software can particularly ease the compliance process if you have responsibility for multiple buildings. It can also help with such aspects as contractor control and fire safety.
- Universities: the centralised dashboards of software like ours can provide excellent visibility of the current, overall compliance situation at a university. Such a platform can also make the distribution of compliance responsibilities easier, and assist with the integration of ISO standards.
How to get started with workplace compliance software
Going through the following stages can enable your organisation to make the most of its first involvement with workplace compliance software:
- Assess your organisation’s compliance gaps and needs
- Define your organisation’s key compliance goals – for example, with regard to audit readiness, task automation, and/or multi-site control
- Engage stakeholders across your organisation’s departments
- Choose a workplace compliance software package that aligns with UK standards and the particular requirements your organisation has in its sector
- Train the people within your company who will be using the software, and set key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success.
Conclusion: compliance isn’t a burden – it’s a strategic advantage
When you design and implement your organisation’s digital compliance approach effectively, you can go a long way to strengthening the safety, resilience, and reputation of your organisation.
By putting the right systems in place, your organisation can position itself to focus on growth, instead of merely avoiding penalties.
Vision Pro Software provides an intelligent and scalable way to embed compliance into the day-to-day operations and culture of your workplace, to an extent that would be difficult or impossible to achieve with purely manual, non-digital approaches.
Why not, then, contact the Vision Pro Software team today, to find out more about how our comprehensive solution can help upgrade every aspect of your workplace compliance?
