Ensuring workplace communication stays compliant is no easy task, especially in a growing organization. Employees leave their teams, new locations are added and new employees are hired on a daily basis. Monitoring compliance across a growing organization can feel like a never-ending task. Communication tools, such as video conferencing, instant messages, email, and social networks are a necessity for today’s businesses.
However, each of these tools must be appropriately managed to ensure full compliance with your corporate policies as well as legal requirements. Let’s go over five ways you can better ensure workplace communication stays compliant.
Require secure passwords
As simple as it sounds, passwords are one of the easiest ways to ensure workplace communication stays compliant. When employees leave your organization or stop working in a specific department, passwords should be immediately changed.
If employees only have to remember one password, rather than creating individual passwords for each of their accounts, it makes it easier for them to inadvertently share the password with someone else.
While passwords are essential to keeping your business secure, protecting them with a password management tool ensures they’re never forgotten, deleted, or leaked.
Limit access to shared files
Shared files are a major leak within an organization. Employees often make mistakes when sending emails, from sending messages to the wrong recipients to including confidential attachments and files by accident.
That’s why it’s best to limit access to only those who need access to a file. Also consider restricting or disabling the ability to print, download, and forward sensitive files.
When employees leave your company, their accounts need to be closed. If their account is not closed, they will have access to all your shared files. Leaving an account open is equivalent to leaving the office doors open — this allows anyone to have access to all files.
Implement email archiving solution
Email archiving allows an organization to comply with government and corporate regulations. It also helps workplace communication stays compliant by ensuring emails are archived in accordance with email retention policies.
Archiving solutions protect emails from permanent loss, deletion, or tampering. They ensure that emails are saved for a specified amount of time and can be quickly restored upon need.
Email archiving solutions also reduce the burden and cost of maintaining expensive email server storage requirements. They save an organization’s time and money by allowing for seamless search and retrieval of archived emails.
Create and enforce policy
Most organizations create a company policy to outline how employees should use approved communication tools. Companies should regularly review their policy to ensure it keeps up with changing technology and as well as the changing work landscape.
As many businesses switch to remote work, they may have employees using personal devices that can access work accounts and communicate company information.
With most of the communication happening online, it’s best to review communication policy and consider covering incidents online in order to prevent remote harassment and bullying.
Educate your employees
One of the most important things you can do is to educate your employees. The more they know about your compliance guidelines, the less likely they are to make an error.
Take the time to train your employees on any and all compliance guidelines that are relevant to your particular industry. When your employees have the tools they need to make decisions in the best interest of your company, you can rest easy, knowing that your business is in good hands. This is especially important when it comes to record retention requirements, as they’ll need to know when to store important documents and when to dispose of them.
Establish a culture of security
It’s important to establish and maintain a culture of security within your organization. When employees are aware of new regulations, they are more likely to adhere to them and less likely to make mistakes.
Creating a culture of compliance will streamline communications across your organization, improve your team’s productivity and keep your data safe and secure.
Having a strong culture of compliance within your organization is crucial because these days, almost everyone has access to electronic communication. Limiting access to only those employees who need it, and keeping them educated on data security best practices is critical.
Wrapping up
Effective communication and collaboration help employees be more productive and satisfied, and that boosts a company’s bottom line. But, if not managed properly, these tools can create serious risks.
The rise of cloud-based tools and mobile devices has made communication and collaboration easier than ever. But the move to cloud-based tools has made it easier for employees to leak confidential corporate information.
At the same time, compliance regulations have never been more complex. Companies face increasing scrutiny from regulators and consumers alike. The risks are very real and the penalties can be severe.
Organizations that fail to implement the right tools or fail to train their employees on how to use them properly put themselves at risk, so don’t wait until disaster strikes to create a cultire of communication compliance in your company.
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