Compliance with cybersecurity starts with creating governance controls and policies. Policies protect your organization from lawsuits and give a road map for operations. The policies focus on compliance with the law, streamline internal processes, and offer internal decision-making.
They should be formulated to give every employee an equal chance, create a friendly and safe working environment, and provide a guide on how teams should conduct themselves. However, no matter how forward or well-formulated they are, the policies do not benefit your organization if they are not followed.
Employees hate the idea of following rules. At the same time, they cannot be bulldozed into abiding by them. How can the human resource team drive accountability in an organization?
Why Companies Need Policies
Policies act as a form of written guidelines for employees to follow. The compliance requirements ensure that the management understands their job and execute it correctly. Once procedures and policies have been created, the employees must be made to understand why they should follow them. Policies and procedures protect the fluency of workflow.
When they are not followed, production is likely to flop, and revenue may be lost. Policies make it easy for the management to identify risks and mistakes and address them early. Following procedures means that the organization’s processes can run efficiently, and goals can be achieved.
What HR Does
The function of the human resource (HR)is at the core of the employer identity and business progress. HR hires and retains the best employees. However, it also has a crucial responsibility in the compliance structure of a company.
Every organization has policies governing its functions. HR must find ways of navigating the laws to protect the company from incurring fines and penalties. A breach could quickly hamper an organization’s reputation.
Ways For Ensuring Compliance With Policies
Formulating the right policies is not just about regulations. A company needs collaboration and the right mediums to measure compliance. All of this is manual and can consume a lot of time and energy. Automating them, however, with a software solution can boost efficiency and foster compliance within an organization.
Engage Divisional Leaders
Begin by involving the key players within the organization. The policies are created by divisional leaders who do not understand the tasks of other departments. Involving all the team players ensures that policies are understood, the right terminologies are used, and they all make sense to the employees.
Set Clear Expectations
Not until the employee handbook has clear expectations, they will not meet the requirements. It means that clear goals need to be established. Be careful to set conditions for your employees. Give conditions for device use at work and give clear guidelines on risk management.
Identify the Best Format
Every department has unique experiences and schedules. The HR must, therefore, ensure that the policies are delivered to each department through the channel they are most comfortable with. The divisional leaders should guide on the best channel to use. Employees should know where to access the procedures. The policies must also make sense and be easy to understand.
Automate
The policies and procedures of every organization must be feasible. You need to have a program that customizes employee certifications. Be sure also to determine the best format for each department.
Take advantage of various software programs with different formats such as PowerPoint and Mp4, among others. Be keen also to set deadlines for the acknowledgment of the policies. Invest in a program that sends notification alerts, including renewal, overdue notifications, among others.
Give Clear Procedures for Misconduct
Policies and procedures can be created, but employees can still choose to ignore them. You may place the company at significant risk by failing to stipulate policies for misconduct. What steps should be taken should an employee be found to be noncompliant?
You also need to set the number of warnings to give to each employee. For instance, what should happen if an employee shares company data outside the working environment? Determine also the penalty to be levied for misconduct.
If an employee chooses to ignore the idea of using malware or firewall on their devices when in the working environment, what should happen? While protecting company data starts with enforcing policies, the other major step to be taken is to solidify individual commitment to cybersecurity.
Train Employees
Because cybersecurity changes every day, be keen to train employees on risk management in an ongoing process. This will help to maintain compliance. You may have to adjust the policies and conduct regular training sessions to ensure compliance with company policies. These policies must be reviewed at least once a year or when changes need to be made. Be careful to secure company data and oversight.
Compliance is essential for the success of any organization in the current legal environment. It should be viewed as a means of defining behavior to ensure the policies and procedures are followed.
