Compliance: How completely do you address your responsibilities?

Can you tick every box on every compliance element that touches your business?

There are a lot of boxes to tick. The good news is, there is no shortage of guidance when it comes to ensuring that the environment you provide for your employees to work in is safe all the time. Nobody should be exposed to any sort of danger at work, no matter how minimal it might seem. 

The harsh reality of business life is if you get it wrong, or simply forget or overlook the necessary actions set down by regulators, you could find yourself committing a criminal offence. This blog is about getting it right everywhere, by adopting a very simple approach to mastering a very complex issue. This involves a three-step process:

• Define your own compliance landscape
• Explore and understand the value of software solutions to enable you to manage risk
• Deploy an integrated software solution across the business 

A great starting point for gaining a detailed overview of what the responsibilities are that affect any business can be found on the Health and Safety Executive's website. It offers guidance on what your responsibilities are, the reporting you need to be aware of, and plenty of useful and practical advice on how to do things right. It focuses on keeping people safe and healthy at work.

Large companies may have a facilities management team, or at least a facilities manager, charged with the role of planned and preventive maintenance. It’s possible that these specialists are using Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM) Software to simplify and automate the many complex processes involved in maintaining the physical estate. But this isn’t always the case.

Let’s now define the three-steps mentioned previously:

Define your compliance landscape: What does compliance mean to your business? 

HSE guidance is one part of the statutory compliance responsibilities matrix that affects a business. There are others. Compliance is a many-tentacled beast that reaches into every part of every organisation. 

Even if your business is a mid-sized operation, or relatively small, you’re affected. Your premises may not involve complex sites and building services. These might be maintained by a building owner providing maintenance services within your lease agreement, but compliance still touches your business. You may not require dedicated staff to attend regularly to physical assets, and never be concerned with hazardous waste, or similar ‘process-specific’ threats, but there are other aspects to compliance beyond the physical; beyond the environment you can touch and feel. 

This is another environment where dangers and risks are not always as self-evident as in the physical realm, but where compliance is of equal stature and importance even in areas where the well-being of employees is not at risk; in the areas of financial management and IT compliance.

Manage risk: Comply in every dimension 

There are practical ways of keeping on top of compliance, not just of the many regulations that might affect you but, more pertinently, the actions you can take to make sure you’re doing the right thing. The essential starting point is to define precisely what compliance means to your business. Outside of estates compliance, the main areas are HR, financial, and IT (not least data governance as per GDPR, but also steps taken to protect third party data from external attacks or compromise).

Given the diversity of these areas, it’s simply best practice to have a centralised means of control. A recommendation I quite often make to companies, is to look closely at how Facilities Management Software can help in all your compliance management. It’s designed to take complexity in and deliver simplicity out. 

When you simply redefine the input parameters to match your total compliance exposure, you can gain a view of the overall picture all in one place. A solution we work with our customers on at Excitech, to manage compliance, is ARCHIBUS; originally created as a Facilities Management Software solution but adaptable to be far more than that. 

Deploy an integrated solution across the business: Protecting the health and safety of the business, and its people

You can be sure that the overall regulatory environment will never stop evolving as new risks emerge. Organisations must meet wide-ranging legislative requirements around fire safety, water treatment, legionella management, staff duty of care, medical equipment, elevators, gas safety, electrical testing, asbestos, owner/tenant agreements and how they conduct affairs financially and digitally. 

Facilities Management Software supports strategies to manage and ensure compliance of all elements. It enables you to map, schedule, action and audit the measures you have in place. It can act as a central repository for all necessary information. It provides the complete picture both for senior management and the personnel within the business whose responsibility it is to keep affairs on track. 

Specific regulations and contract terms can be associated with exact regimes in each area from how you deal with data and finance to planned and preventive maintenance for the estate. The software can be tailored for critical areas of your business; service-level agreements, for example, and the compliance verification actions that govern them. They can be applied to manage contractor works, as well as those handled by direct employees, essential with the wide range of elements to keep compliant. Compliance certification can be completed immediately whilst on the move.

It’s easy to overlook the complex details of compliance. The risk involved is too great not to apply rigour and diligence to being completely aware of what has to be done to address all your responsibilities and having the visibility to know when.

Talk to us about your Compliance and Facilities Management challenges by getting in touch with us on 01992 807 444 or by emailing marketing@excitech.co.uk.