Compliance is one of the most challenging areas of HR management. There are a vast number of labor laws that organizations need to comply with on top of everything else that HR leaders have to focus on.
Almost every aspect of human resources is subject to some sort of compliance guidelines, including payroll, benefits, and recruiting. To keep track of all of these requirements, many HR teams rely on HR compliance software.
Not only can the right HR compliance software help organizations keep all HR practices compliant with key employment laws, but the software can also help automate common compliance tasks. Automation is an excellent tool for simplifying HR compliance processes to prevent non-compliance and save time.
Explore how and why this software is essential for helping behavioral health and human services organizations comply with labor laws and industry-specific regulations.
Understanding the Multitude of Compliance Requirements That Organizations Face
Human resources compliance involves staying on top of numerous regulations. HR professionals must constantly juggle compliance issues related to different federal employment laws, from FMLA to FLSA to EEOC.
And if those four-letter acronyms aren’t enough to contend with, there are plenty of other compliance requirements specific to the behavioral health and human services industry, like HIPAA and HITECH. Certain behavioral health organizations such as Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics (CCBHCs) have even more strenuous compliance requirements, including specific expectations around the range of services offered and how quickly patients are seen.
In addition to the federal laws, there are state and local laws to consider. This can get particularly complex when behavioral health organizations expand into telehealth and telemedicine.
If you’re hiring remotely throughout different cities or states, you’ll need to stay on top of the local laws for every region that you employ people in. Local patient care laws and provider licensing requirements must also be followed when seeing patients spread out across different cities, counties, and states.
To top things off, regulations are constantly changing, and new ones are always being added. It can be challenging to try and stay on track with the latest changes. So, how do small businesses and nonprofits do it? They use HR compliance management software.
Leverage HR Compliance Software to Reduce Risk Through Automation
For HR teams, automation is an excellent solution for managing the many moving pieces of regulatory compliance. Think of it as a friend or assistant keeping track of things for you and reminding you of upcoming deadlines. HR compliance software can automate processes and minimize compliance risks throughout the entire employee lifecycle. Here are just a few examples.
Recruiting Compliance
Automated workflows can greatly improve your hiring process, ensuring all required steps are completed efficiently while helping to eliminate bias along the way. In addition to helping you maintain compliance when hiring, a recruiting management system can help you create a positive applicant experience and shorten your time to hire.
Onboarding Compliance
Once you’ve chosen a candidate to hire, there’s a lot of important compliance paperwork to handle. I-9 forms need to be completed within a set period of time and according to specific compliance requirements. You’ll also need to collect tax forms like form W-4 and handle any added risk management tasks, like getting the employee handbook and at-will employment acknowledgments signed.
Wage and Hour Requirements
Complying with minimum wage law, recordkeeping, overtime pay, and other time and payroll regulations becomes simplified when the details of these requirements can be automated. For example, your HR compliance software can alert you in real time when an employee is approaching overtime and help ensure that all employees are compensated appropriately. It can also automate time tracking and timesheet approvals so employees are paid on time for the correct hours worked.
Credential Management
Within the behavioral health and human services industry, there are numerous licenses, degrees, certifications, and other credentials that various employees are required to have to do their jobs. Having this information stored with each employee’s information can help you manage these credentials. Setting automatic reminders when an individual’s credentials are about to expire can help you stay proactive with keeping your employees credentialed and your organization compliant.
ACA Benefits Compliance
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) sets some compliance and filing guidelines for employee benefits administration. HR software can automate ACA compliance and benefits enrollment to streamline the benefits process for employees and employers. Management of other benefits, including retirement plans, can also be automated with the right compliance support solution.
Offboarding Compliance
Separations come with a large number of compliance requirements. State regulations set strict guidelines on how and when you should process an employee’s final paycheck. You are also required to make employees aware of their eligibility for COBRA and ensure that they receive COBRA paperwork within the required time window. Automating your offboarding checklist can help you ensure that employees receive the proper communications and payments.
Performance Management
Documenting employee performance discussions is a good risk management practice, but it can be time-consuming. The right HR software can automate and simplify employee performance documentation with quick templates and communication tools, giving your company a paper trail if a termination is challenged.
Employee Data Management
In healthcare, patient privacy and data handling are highly important, but it’s also important to store and handle employee data in a compliant manner. Employee records should be managed securely with appropriate permissions set to ensure that information is only available to those who need it. Automating and streamlining data storage can help organizations stay organized and record all of the proper documents in a secure location.
How the Right HR Compliance Software Can Help
While it’s possible to find individual systems to handle each operation you’d like to automate, choosing one unified software that can handle your all-of-the-above list of automation requirements can save you time, money, and headaches. A single all-in-one system provides true integration, enabling your team to enter data once and let automated processes monitor regulations to maintain HR compliance.
Unified HR software can help your team with everything from document management to calculating taxes, monitoring employee credentials, and maintaining wage and hour compliance. This can greatly free up your time to focus on strategic initiatives – things like employee engagement and company culture that are essential to your organization’s success but are also aspects of your organization that can’t be automated.
Simplify HR Compliance Management With ContinuumCloud
The right compliance management solution can take a lot of weight off of your shoulders. But you’ll want to find the best HR compliance software for your organization’s needs. There are many HR compliance software solutions on the market, but ContinuumCloud’s human capital management platform is the only HR compliance tool built specifically to address the compliance needs of behavioral health and human services organizations.
From user-friendly, on-demand reporting that makes it easy to track compliance metrics and credential renewals to payroll automation that ensures timely, compliant payroll processing each period, ContinuumCloud’s HCM platform can easily streamline compliance.
Get in touch to learn more about ContinuumCloud and how it can automate your HR compliance processes.
