Whether your organisation is involved in the public or private sector – encompassing such potential activities as healthcare, education, or property management, to cite just a few – you will need to be sure your compliance risk processes are as good as they can be.
Unfortunately, there are too many examples today of organisations for which such optimal compliance risk management is not evident in their operations.
So, today, we will consider the potential indicators of your organisation’s approach to compliance risk, bringing avoidable dangers, and how you can take steps to combat these issues.
What are compliance risk processes, and why are they critical?
The term “compliance risk management” refers to the process of identifying and managing the risks that can arise from failure to follow rules and regulations.
Any responsible organisation, then, needs to put in place various compliance risk processes. These can encompass such elements as risk assessments, the development of internal policies and procedures, and monitoring and reporting. Processes like these allow for compliance risks to be identified, assessed, and managed.
If your organisation is in an asset-heavy sector such as healthcare, education, or property management, you should be striving to manage your assets in a responsible and efficient manner. This will help protect your organisation from costly legal and/or financial penalties that could otherwise occur if you do not adhere to the regulations.
Whether in relation to asset management or other aspects of your organisation’s operations, ensuring the robustness of your compliance processes is of critical importance. It will help you satisfy your legal obligations, while swerving clear of financial penalties, reputational damage, and/or operational risks.
Naturally, achieving compliance with regulations is not a one-off or “one-time-only” event; it is a constant and continuous obligation imposed upon companies. So, your organisation can’t afford to take a merely reactive approach to compliance risk management – it must instead adopt a proactive and structured one.
Disorganised or incomplete compliance records
During the 2020s, practically any organisation, in any industry, will inevitably have to deal with a growing number of documents and records. If there aren’t proper management systems in place for these records, chaos could easily reign. Even trying to find one specific document could become a time-consuming headache for members of your team.
Some of your company’s documents and records could be crucial for showing that your organisation adheres to certain rules and regulations in its industry.
So, if your company’s compliance records are scattered, inconsistent, or incomplete, this won’t just slow down workflows and cause inconvenience – it could also open up your organisation to serious compliance and financial risks.
Such risks might come about due to such issues as:
- Spreadsheets that depend on users manually updating them – and indeed, which might not have been updated for a while, leaving behind inaccurate and out-of-date information.
- Manual paperwork, some of which may date back to a time before your organisation modernised other aspects of its recordkeeping.
- Siloed systems – in other words, separate and isolated recordkeeping systems and processes that might not be easily accessed, or even known about, by other stakeholders who need to see such records.
The existence of such common problems helps explain why there has been such a strong emphasis on the development of more centralised documentation approaches in recent times.
There has been a rise to prominence of cloud-based risk compliance and asset management software platforms – such as Vision Pro Software – that allow for records to be kept and made accessible in one place. Such software, in turn, greatly helps ensure strong audit readiness and accurate regulatory reporting.
Struggling to keep up with regulatory changes
One reason why proactive (and not merely reactive) compliance risk management processes are so important for organisations, is the frequency with which laws and standards can change in the UK.
Your organisation may need to keep on top of regulations and guidelines in relation to:
- Fire safety, such as the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005
- Legionella, such as the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE)’s L8 Approved Code of Practice (ACOP) and guidance publication
- Asbestos, such as the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 (CAR 2012), and associated texts like the HSE’s L143 ACOP and guidance publication
In many cases, the legal requirements and recommendations applicable to particular industries may remain relatively stable over a number of years. However, this might simply heighten the likelihood of your organisation’s personnel missing crucial updates to the rules, which could then lead to your business falling out of compliance.
You can probably begin to appreciate, then, why it could be greatly useful for your employees to have access to a single, centralised platform that provides automated alerts and regulatory tracking. Such a solution can help make sure all the relevant people in your company keep pace with the latest changes to the rules.
Key compliance tasks being missed or delayed
It is one thing for the people within your organisation to broadly know what needs to be done to keep your organisation in compliance. However, if you depend purely on old-fashioned manual processes, it can be easy for vital compliance tasks to be overlooked, or to be carried out later than they need to be – thereby opening your business up to risks.
If, then, you see any of the following warning signs within your organisation, you should be considering how you can modernise and optimise your compliance risk processes:
- Inspections of property, assets, and equipment being frequently overdue
- Risk assessments being late or incomplete
- Vital safety checks being missed
If such delays or oversights do occur, your organisation might be in breach of regulations and guidelines like those mentioned above. This could subject your organisation to legal exposure, in addition to compromising the reliability and longevity of your company’s assets, and the safety of your staff.
Thankfully, when you invest in the right risk compliance and asset management software – incorporating features like automation and scheduled workflows – your company will no longer need to depend to such a great extent on repeated, manual human intervention.
This sophisticated functionality can help mitigate the human error that can so easily occur when organisations depend on manual processes alone to ensure compliance.
A lack of real-time visibility into compliance risks
Another factor in company decision-makers often failing to maintain compliance, is their inability to gain a comprehensive, real-time overview of what is going on within their organisations.
Such real-time visibility into compliance risks is essential, because it enables decision-makers to much more proactively identify and address potential issues as they arise. This means problems can be tackled before they are allowed to escalate into bigger crises.
Sure enough, today’s leading compliance risk management platforms – of which Vision Pro Software is one – incorporate dashboards that enable a quick and straightforward overview of the real-time data on the given organisation’s compliance status.
By incorporating such features like live reporting and instant risk alerts, these platforms can help keep stakeholders aware of the latest compliance situation at their organisation. This level of real-time oversight helps greatly improve strategic decision-making and accountability.
Compliance responsibilities are spread too thin
A major theme of this article has been the importance of not leaving your organisation overly dependent on manual, human-led approaches alone in order to ensure constant adherence to rules and regulations.
One big challenge that can arise in this regard, may be that of sheer numbers and capacity. In today’s world, there is a complex regulatory landscape for UK organisations to navigate, encompassing such aspects as fire safety, legionella, asbestos, asset tracking, and audits. Managing multiple compliance areas can be especially challenging across large estates – and yet, your organisation may only have so many people available to handle such matters.
The risks of overburdened teams depending on manual processes include costly human errors, as well as certain compliance areas not being adequately dealt with at all.
This underscores the potential relevance and benefits of stretched organisations choosing to consolidate their compliance management under one system, such as Vision Pro Software. Our cloud-based software offers a full feature set, while still being easy and quick to access and use.
Being overly dependent on manual or outdated processes
To be clear: in our mentions of “manual” processes throughout this article, we have been referring to tasks that are manually carried out by a person. Examples of these include typing, sending emails, or entering data into a spreadsheet.
While paper logs, spreadsheets, and legacy systems have long been instrumental in organisations’ compliance management efforts, the reality is that they cannot keep up with modern compliance demands.
As we have mentioned, the regulatory landscape of today is a complicated and multilayered one. In the face of this – and the many technological advances of recent years – the relatively inefficient and cumbersome manual compliance tracking methods of the past bring unacceptable risks of data loss and errors.
Committing your organisation to a digital transformation process can therefore be key to streamlining its compliance workflows.
How can compliance software like Vision Pro Software solve these challenges?
When an organisation invests in a complete compliance software solution – such as Vision Pro Software – that fits in strongly with how businesses and organisations during the 2020s operate, it can unlock a wide range of benefits:
- Cloud-based accessibility, which enables real-time collaboration across multiple sites
- Automated alerts and tracking, which minimise the scope for human error and help guard against deadlines being missed
- Secure and centralised data management, which eliminates silos and simplifies audits
- Scalability and cost efficiency, qualities that make Vision Pro Software ideal for large organisations such as the NHS, universities, academies, and substantial property portfolios
- Compliance-specific features, covering such vital areas as fire risk, legionella, asbestos, and asset lifecycle management.
What are the next steps to strengthen your compliance risk management?
Making the following moves will enable you to bring up your organisation’s compliance risk management approach to the high standards it needs to reach:
- Conducting a compliance risk audit to assess weaknesses in this aspect of your organisation’s operations
- Transitioning to a leading digital compliance solution such as Vision Pro Software
- Training your in-house teams and embedding compliance culture throughout your organisation
- Leveraging data insights to improve your organisation’s long-term risk mitigation.
Would you like to directly experience Vision Pro Software’s wide-ranging features, functionality, and performance, before you commit your organisation to this platform? If so, you are welcome to enquire to our team today, via phone or email, to arrange a demo.
