How to Reduce the Compliance Risk in a Remote Workforce?
Over the past few months many businesses have changed their operations due to the global pandemic Covid-19. Whether they earlier had employees to work from home as needed, hired in-office staff, hired remote staff or had only remote employees, including implementing work from home policies more and more companies are embracing this trend. Along with the benefits of working remotely, there are a few complications too in terms of compliance.
With the changing work environment and shift to working remotely, businesses are facing new security challenges as it is harder to prevent all types of fraud, including securing remote workforces. An unsupervised work environment is ideal for some schemes in particular. Though, there are risks associated with fraud and bribery have always been present. Things are not business as usual. However, amidst all the changes something has to remain constant which is forgotten by most of the businesses is meeting compliance. Businesses have to understand that just because employees are now working from home that does not necessarily mean the compliance regulations no longer apply.
Any policy that you followed before COVID-19 pandemic also has to be applied to work conducted as remote as well. And unfortunately, the risks have only increased and the pressure to take preventative measures is rising, so it’s necessary to take help from Compliance services. But where do you start? How do you reduce the compliance risk in a remote setting? Well, that depends on the type of organization.
Here is a list of some challenges that organizations might face and how these can be combated with the help of compliance services:
Staying secure and compliant:
The very first, and the most important thing is knowing where data resides while employees are working remotely. When you don't pay much attention to the data or it is left unsupervised, and there is enhanced access to systems and files, employees working remotely could easily access those files and even steal company’s data. If there is any loss of data or customer data is used, it could lead your organization to face legal issues, losing of funds, losing loyalty among customers and reputation damage at worst.
So it is important that your organization takes help from compliance services to set boundaries and ensure that data in teams is encrypted at rest in transport and uses secure real-time protocol for video, audio and desktop sharing. Especially when it comes to the employees working with sensitive data majorly in financial services or in healthcare sectors, the compliance team can help you protect and control sensitive documents by suggesting tools and softwares. For instance, a software can control the access of data and if someone outside your organization tries to log in.
Even if data is not your concern, which happens rarely, think about your communication channels, marketing materials and sales strategies. These are the few things that also contain your organization’s and client specific confidential information.
Tip: Mandate the use of secure softwares along with secure work emails. Lay down the rules by closely collaborating with compliance services about encryption of sensitive material. Check constantly if the GDPR requirement is met.
Issues with monitoring payroll
Hourly employees are basically clocked according to the in and out times. The practice of keeping track of the hours they work remotely is also critically important but it can become difficult. In small and mid-sized companies, remote work makes monitoring the payroll and checking whether the employees meet the criteria of the work hours becomes a difficult task.
For instance, they might step away from the work and you might be thinking of it as their on-the-work time. In this case it becomes harder to verify the paychecks that are sent to them, the time they are spending on working and if they are getting paid the right amounts or not.
Automation can help in avoiding the unnecessary and labour-intensive paper-based audits. As we mentioned the challenges around sharing information securely, your organization can easily mitigate the risk by collaborating marketing solutions with automation and in turn improve your regulatory compliance. Using automation will make all your processes including mandating approvals, as well as all the audit trials and record keeping according to the FCA requirements.
Enabling simple policies and defining clear security rules among onboarding employees:
To comply with your organization's internal policies, industry regulations or legal needs all your company’s information should be properly governed. We can’t stress enough how security is important, so when onboarding a new employee it is important to train employees about using the standard tools such as two factor authentication when they log into any other device apart from company-owned devices or the usage of VPN.
This means it is important to ensure that all the required information is kept while if you think any of the data as a liability or is no longer required to keep can be deleted. Some rules and regulations can be set for instance, retention policies for the data exchanges which can be applied and addressed to the entire organization.
All in all, remote work is becoming increasingly commonplace worldwide and soon it will become a necessity rather than a trend. So it is important that businesses know beforehand the security threats and issues with confidentiality and lay a comprehensive set of security measures that are vital for the organization.