3 ways to combat compliance fatigue

Compliance fatigue is real. It feels as though the checks are endless. Fire risk assessments. Daily opening and closing procedure. Health and safety. Food stock rotation. Annual audits. Just as you check one task off, another five crop up in its place.

It doesn’t help that the goalposts are always moving. Rules change, compliance standards tighten, and new legislation comes into effect. We saw this with the pandemic. To stop the spread of COVID, there were countless new health and safety procedures. And these were piled on top of already stretched workloads.???

In any multi-site organisation, managing compliance is a large undertaking. Every location has to complete the necessary inspections and tests. And area and regional managers somehow have to watch every site at any given time. The stakes are high. Non-compliance costs?more than double?the cost of maintaining compliance.

So what can you do? How can full compliance become a streamlined, manageable aspect of your organisation??

Plan in advance

One of the greatest ways to simplify compliance is to schedule tasks in advance.

With automatic renewal and expiration of inspections and audits, your teams know exactly what’s expected of them and when. You don’t have to rely on staff remembering the long list of boxes to tick. Real-time checklists will share all upcoming deadlines. Then, as soon as they complete one check, the next is on their schedule according to a frequency set by you.

You can also assign tasks to qualified individuals at each location. This allows staff to plan and prioritise their schedule based around what’s most urgent. With no question of who’s responsible for what, you can ensure no critical tasks are ever missed.

Centralise all information

The audit process slows down when only a select few have the right information. Responsibility falls to one person or team who knows the process like the back of their hand. Everyone else is in the dark. This is all well and good – until that one employee is absent or leaves the business altogether.

Centralising important documents helps to manage risk and share responsibility for compliance. Using one database that all staff have access to, you can seamlessly hand over everything anyone needs to know.?

Anyone picking up the responsibility can automatically have full access to the corresponding guidance and process outline. And with it all being digital, nothing is lost on paper and any documents can be updated as rules and regulations change. This also applies to creating a centralised bank of which staff possess which skills. That way, you can pick out cover based on an employee’s location, role, or experience.

Oversight

It’s impossible for head office staff or area managers to oversee all locations at the same time. But with the right tools and systems, you can improve their visualisation of how each one is performing in terms of compliance.

You want to be able to capture key data surrounding each site’s completed tasks, scores, and upcoming deadlines. And you want this presented in a simple format, available on the move for busy managers.?

With valuable insights and reports at their fingertips, managers can make informed, impactful decisions. They can quickly identify where their attention is needed most or any staff that need additional training. This encourages continuous performance improvement across all regions and sites.

Managing your organisation’s compliance?can?be a nightmare. But it doesn’t have to be. With a proactive, organised approach – and the right tools to support you – it becomes simple and streamlined.

With?Inform People, you can conduct paperless, customisable audits with ease. Keeping your business safe, secure, and protected has never been simpler. To find out more,?get in touch?on 0161 713 4104 or at [email protected].