Human Resources Governance and Compliance: Essentials of Compliance

Abstract

Corporate compliance made it to the agenda of many board meetings. The full integration of compliance in the human resources function is still on the agenda of many organizations. On one hand, the increasing number of HR-related compliance obligations and, on the other hand, the tight resources in the human resources function/department are generating a challenge for every person responsible for human resources in the organization.

The outline below looks into HR compliance from four different perspectives and targets to give some guidance:

• People: How to bring the message across and integrate compliance into the daily work in human resources?

• Economic: How to deal with cost to implement compliance in human resources, the potential damage of noncompliance, and the overall benefit of being a compliant company/function/department?

• Risk: How to manage the compliance assessment and remediate findings?

• Operational: How to integrate controls into the HR operations to ensure a sustainable, reliable handling of compliance topics?

In December 2014, the International Standard Organization (ISO) has introduced a new standard for compliance (corporate compliance). This standard needs to be integrated into human resources. Organizations will have to revisit the current situation related to the compliance in human resources, perform a comprehensive assessment, and integrate the findings while implementing the new ISO standard. The outline below will provide some advice how to manage this task.