Ensuring compliance in construction: top tips and strategies for success

Compliance is a complex, time-consuming and expensive task for any industry, but few more so than construction. This is especially true with mobile workers in trying to ensure you always inform all your employees about the latest compliance regulations, where you can’t easily report or track their actions. 

Understanding the importance of compliance

Why is it important to ensure compliance? If your employees forget or don’t understand any compliance changes, it leaves your organisation open to breaches, resulting in fines, penalties and even being named and shamed by the government, damaging your potential growth and future recruitment opportunities. 

Regulations are in place to keep your employees safe at work, help build and maintain trust with employees and clients, enhance consistency and can prevent unforeseen errors. 

To combat these challenges associated with compliance breaches, we’ve pulled together three top tips to ensure you’re always up to date, no matter where your employees are based.
 

1. Implementing effective policies and procedures

With employees at different locations, it can be difficult to keep track of who has knowledge of policies and if they are being enforced. Using software that sends and tracks employee policy documents and their engagement can help ensure your employees’ knowledge is up to date with the latest information. 

Keep your employees aware of requirements regarding their job and give them the opportunity to refer to the relevant policies when they are on-site, giving them confidence they are doing their job in line with the latest regulations. This allows you to trust that all your sites are running consistently in line with the latest regulations and your employees are safe.

Our HR and payroll solutions allow employers, managers and supervisors to see, share and track policy documents with their teams to ensure employees have read and understood the latest compliance changes, giving you confidence your risks are reduced.
 

2. Real-time reporting

Payroll software with real-time reporting is critical, due to the flexibility and time and cost savings involved. Manual processes such as paper timesheets are time-consuming and expensive, costing organisations £1,500 a year per employee.

This is even worse across multiple sites where these processes might differ and take time to collate. Repetitive data entry into multiple systems can be a tedious and repetitive task causing human error and resulting in employees distrusting their employer.

Real-time reporting creates a seamless data stream from employee devices on their different sites straight to payroll. This seamless automated stream also decreases data breaches as there are no paper timesheets with employee details that could be misplaced or lost, helping to keep your company GDPR compliant. Real-time reporting also helps to avoid fines from HMRC as payroll is accurate and on time.

Our software allows employees to clock-in and out using their mobile phones, tablet or computer anywhere and anytime. Data is then sent straight to payroll to wait for approval. Using an employee location service, you can see where they clocked-in and out preventing time fraud; companies who are currently using manual processes lose as much as 7% of their profits due to time fraud. 

This is often because employees get their timesheets in last minute, struggle to remember and often estimate (or purposely add on extra time) on their timesheet.
 

3. Building a culture of compliance

Having a training programme that employees can access on any device, anywhere and anytime is essential for organisations working on multiple sites to ensure all employees have access to the training programmes they need regardless of location. Educating your employees on the laws and regulations applicable to their job and industry helps maintain safety on-site, minimise risk, provide a better environment for your employees to work in, and maintain your organisation’s reputation – increasing productivity in the long run.

With our learning management solutions (LMS), you can transform the way your workforce learns and understands compliance. It gives you the ability to easily create, manage, and organise your own learning, compliance, enablement, and user-adoption materials specifically for your employees’ jobs. New compliance changes? No problem, our learning suite allows you to edit and update learning content with the latest regulations.

Once you have created your compliance materials you can measure the effectiveness from a single dashboard. This allows you to manage your employees' progress and see what works best for them, through materials such as gamification and quizzes. Then you can tailor future material in a way that gets the best results from your employees.

If you need support improving your compliance processes, MHR can help! With automated payroll, real-time reporting and our robust LMS, we can ensure your organisation is always compliant, keep your employees engaged and help your business grow.