Everyday, businesses in the energy industry need to ensure that they remain compliant with regulatory requirements, or pay hefty non-compliance fines. Often, this leaves them with a checklist of requirements that they need to meet. Compliance can be not only time-consuming but also costly.
As a result, when new regulations arise, you might find yourself remaining non-compliant due to financial constraint or not keeping up with the changes due to a technical constraint. While you risk hefty fines, you might also lose customers who are conscious of working with compliant businesses. Even worse, since these regulations might drastically change certain parts of your industry, you can get accused of deceptive sales practices unknowingly. The trick is to learn how to remain in line with the changing regulatory landscape.
Here are three ways to embrace compliance despite changing regulations:
Have Dedicated Policy Owners
Compliance failure can stem from something as simple as ignoring the policies. In some cases, a policy might go unnoticed for months or years after institution. When an employee violates the new policies or recently enacted regulations, it can be tough for compliance officers to identify the violated policy or regulation since it wasn't updated in the first place. Ideally, you need to delegate the task of monitoring certain policies or regulations to certain individuals in your organization. For instance, you can have a governance risk and compliance manager monitor changes in credit card data security regulation to remain compliant.
Improve the Ease of Access to Compliance Policies
More often than not, the policies by an organization will be spread throughout various departments. From Regulatory and IT to safety and data policies, there are a lot of requirements that employees need to follow. If an employee cannot access the policy documents for their department, the chances are that they will go untrained as you risk non-compliance as an organization. Instead, you should leverage a central location for storing such policies, regardless of the department. For instance, you can use policy management software or the company's CRM to display the database of these policies.
Encourage Interdepartmental Communication
Every department has a role to play towards achieving compliance, with some roles being intertwined. For example, while the legal department should ensure that the set compliance policies are at par with what the regulatory requirements need, the HR department should ensure that the policies are easy enough to be understood by your workforce. As a result, there needs to be an open line of communication between such departments. Among the best ways to achieve this is through launching a policy committee with departmental representatives to ensure that the policies meet the intricate needs of every department and leveraging a technology partner that has controls and certifications in place to ensure compliance as a competitive advantage for your organization.
It only takes one mistake to fail in complying with the changing regulatory landscape. The trick to remaining updated is to increase inter-departmental accountability and communication as well as improving access to compliance information. Consider the tips above to protect your business from the negative effects of non-compliance.
At Emerios, we developed a single platform designed for regulated service providers to see, control, and verify all sales activity so they can make better decisions, exceed revenue targets, and use compliance as a competitive advantage. If you would like to learn more Schedule a consultation today.
