In most organisations, the Human Resource (HR) department is often seen as the flag bearer of all policies, compliances and functional routines of daily work. However, there is a need to let go of this belief.

As far as your HR team is concerned, their core responsibility is to ensure the well-being of all employees and support them in growing their skill sets to better serve the organisation’s and their own individual aspirations. They are not the right people to be made solely responsible for ensuring the organisation’s adherence to the law of the land. India is a diverse country, and this diversity exists in all wakes of life irrespective of whether you traverse the country East to West or North to South.

This large diversity makes it difficult for HR personnel to enable a seamless compliance guarantee mechanism for the organisation. If you run a survey amongst HR personnel to figure out a job responsibility, they are most hesitant to take up, compliance management will be at the top of the list.

Here are 5 reasons why:

Highly localised employee laws
Most states in India have different geo-political stances to labour laws in their jurisdictions. For example, the minimum wage ceiling per day for various jobs in states like Kerala are far higher than the rates for similar roles in states like Bihar or Maharashtra. Additionally, there are several laws passed by district-level governing bodies and organisations pertaining to employee benefits, safety, work timings and much more. For businesses, having a firm grip on these compliance regulations is an important element especially when they are audited by government agencies during any litigation or complaints. It is nearly impossible for HR personnel to manually manage the large gamut of paperwork and file archives needed to help the organisation stay compliant at all times.

Confidentiality of Information
For regulatory compliance, the data generated for submission often comprises of highly sensitive personal and company information. Such information needs to be handled with extra care. Manual archival of documents and maintenance of physical records makes it hard to offer authorised access of critical data to relevant stakeholders. Any manipulation or tampering of official records may result in grave complexities and actions against the company, which can impact reputation or in cases, the viable existence for future operations. This complexity increases when there are multiple offices for the organisation within the same state and goes to even greater heights when they have offices in multiple states.

Factory Regulation Laws and Inherent Complexities
There are a lot of extra regulatory mandates put in force through legal directives passed by respective jurisdictional regions for operations of factories and establishments in India. These are on top of the already complicated regional labour laws and several of these directives are handled by multiple government agencies. This creates an even bigger network of channels that organisations must report to for running their daily operations. It is easy for the HR team members to get overwhelmed by the magnitude of legal frameworks for which they need to maintain strict documented evidence of adherence. The slightest of mismanagement or erroneous data can lead to heavy sanctions in the wake of a dispute on public courts.

Intra Departmental Coordination
For a business organisation, compliance in all legal frameworks laid out by central and state law bodies requires active contributions from multiple departments like Finance, Quality, Administration, Legal and HR. But it is often seen that the blame rests with HR personnel for not actively coordinating the exchange of information between teams to ensure timely action on initiatives that are practised for compliance. Delays and erroneous data can lead to wrong compliance credentials being submitted to government agencies for regulatory audit and can ultimately result in penalties and sanctions.

Reporting
Stakeholders at different levels of the organisation and government regulatory bodies require reports of varying formats and those which follow diverse policy protocols. Preparing the same manually would take a lot of effort. The entire practice of creating, maintaining and constantly updating reports to prescribed standards is a very tedious task.

Clearly, all such manual, time-consuming tasks can take away the valuable time of the HR team, which could otherwise be used for employee engagement and ensuring employee happiness.

So, what is the ultimate solution to the problem of compliance management? Should an entirely new team be hired to carry out this critical responsibility? The answer to the latter is NO.

As for the former, the solution is going digital, and letting technology empower your HR team to seamlessly and effortlessly assure compliance to all legal and labour laws of the land. By automating internal compliance management, intelligent reporting, setting up personalised reminders for intradepartmental requirements and helping maintain a secure data repository for archiving confidential files, digital transformation can help relieve the pain of HR personnel in ensuring compliance to legal regulations across different areas.

Get in touch with us to know how Core Integra can be the catalyst for making the lives of your HR personnel easier while ensuring your business stays 100% compliant to labour and regional laws.