When it comes to local, state and federal employer compliance laws, there are many rules to know. Whether you’re navigating the Affordable Care Act (ACA), tracking employee time, trying to follow Office of Federal Contract Compliance Program (OFCCP) rules or overseeing Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requests, it’s critical that your business is aware and up to date on these complex rules, or else they’ll risk incurring heavy penalties and fines from the IRS.

To supplement their HR departments, many businesses look to cloud-based HR automated solutions to automate workflows, secure data, generate accurate reporting and ensure compliance is met. Additionally, these tools improve workforce efficiencies, reduce costs and improve company culture. These four HRMS features help ensure compliance is met in a way that many businesses rely on today.

 

4 HRMS Features to Support Compliance

The following HRMS features can help you maneuver through the shifting landscape of complicated rules much more efficiently. After implementation of automated HR solutions, you’ll notice immediately just how useful the technology is for compliance efforts. You’ll get to spend less time on figuring out government regulations and more time on focusing on strategic efforts for your business.

1. Automated workflow efficiencies

HRMS cloud solutions are in demand today because they create customizable, automated efficiencies that support the various HR-related processes in HR management, talent management and time & attendance tracking for administrators overseeing them. Automated tools decrease the need for human hands to mold the data, all but eliminating the risk of manual errors that siphon valuable time and resources from businesses trying to rectify their mistakes. Additionally, with employee self-service tools (more on that below) implemented, your workforce will benefit, too.

Quality HRMS providers will give administrators a robust toolset that empowers them to customize their workflows with the minimum steps necessary to support various HR processes. For example, you can configure enhanced workflows to create an Employee Record Management database, or a step-by-step process for your workforce during Open Enrollment that includes automated communications to keep workers on task. Or, imagine easily checking reports that will show you when any of your employees are closing in on overtime or making a quick correction if your payroll has become noncompliant with your state’s time and labor laws.

Every HR-related process that you rely on is regulated in some way. HRMS cloud solutions help you navigate these confusing guidelines more easily with automated efficiencies. A few process examples include:

  •       Ensuring employee pay is accurate with data synchronization from time & attendance, benefits and payroll
  •       Securing personal employee information including social security numbers, addresses, HIPAA-related information, retirement and more
  •       Assuring accurate reporting is generated for tax purposes and compliance
  •       Storing sensitive corporate data
  •       Generating essential forms at the click of a button during onboarding, OE, tax season and more

2. Employee self-service tools

When you give your employees the access and ability to manage their personal data themselves with an employee portal, it helps relieve the time constraints put on your HR administrators to act as glorified data specialists. There are so many other things your department can do other than updating employee life change events; hunting for benefit statements and paystubs; inputting time-off and sick leave requests; and rounding up paperwork.

HR should be focusing on strategic, high-impact projects that improve employee well-being, enhance benefits packages, improve performance reviews, create the perfect onboarding or succession program and streamline OE.

Additionally, compliance is easier to achieve when both administrators and the employees they oversee are connected though an employee portal. For example, during the OE process, administrators can:

  •       Configure personalized OE profiles for employee based on demographics, so employees see what benefits they qualify for directly in their portal while leaving out the information that doesn’t pertain to them
  •       Create customized alerts and communications to themselves and employees as critical dates approach
  •       Integrate employee portal with a benefit management module to seamlessly send selections to appropriate top-of-class carriers

One last example is the automating of compliance-related forms. For example, during tax season, you can set up each employee portal to automatically retrieve forms such as 1094-B, 1095-B, 1094-C and 1095-C depending on the healthcare they selected. The automatic arrival of forms such as these help to ensure compliance is met and penalties are avoided.

3. Data security

Businesses are keepers of a treasure-trove of sensitive employee and corporate data. It’s your duty to protect this information at all costs, or be at risk for:

  •       Breaching the trust of your employees, customers and partners
  •       Becoming noncompliant due to breaking data privacy laws
  •       Incurring fines and penalties
  •       Cutting resources to pay for the penalties

If you want to ensure that your employee and corporate data is protected, you need to employ a system that is built with layers and layers of protection. The beauty of working with vendors who employ cloud-based solutions is that they are the ones responsible for your security, excepting clear cases of user errors.

When looking for a HRMS system with security top of mind, you may want to consider signing with a vendor who employs the following protective features:

  •       Superuser power to restrict access of specific employees to specific processes
  •       Timeout features that automatically sign employees out when not using the application after a certain amount of time
  •       Guaranteed automatic system updates  
  •       Two-Factor Authentication sign-on features
  •       Data protection with offsite cloud backups

It’s up to you to perform due diligence on the security capabilities of any prospective technology you’re interested in investing in. Make sure to ask the right questions. Work with your employee, technology and leadership stakeholders to determine what’s needed before making any purchases.

4. Provider responsibility

The greatest benefit of employing HRMS cloud solutions is that your provider takes on many responsibilities, allowing you to spend your money on other resources that will improve business operations. For example, instead of paying someone internally to keep your onsite technology up to date, your cloud provider will make automatic updates to your tool for you, typically outside of business hours.

Or, imagine that your employee payroll, benefits and time & attendance data became corrupted during the transfer to the appropriate processor. In this scenario, this corruption forces a delay in employee pay. As many people live paycheck-to-paycheck, this type of issue cannot happen. Aside from potentially preventing families from paying their bills on time, or being able to buy groceries, they will blame you. This will directly affect your ability to attain and retain top talent.

When you shop around for quality HRMS providers, you should ensure that when there are issues with the technology, they’ll take care of it. Many good ones will ensure that they will take care of any economical damage caused by their solutions such as any fees or penalties incurred due to noncompliance.

Make sure to employ a cloud-based HRMS supported by a provider who will help you navigate compliance, update the system automatically, provide you with quality customer service, ensures security, keeps their promises and more.

Navigate HR Compliance Regulations Easier with the Cloud-Based Arcoro Platform

With the cloud-based Arcoro platform, ensuring and navigating various HR compliance issues is easy. The automated tool reduces the amount of manual labor that goes into data maintenance, filing and other required compliance-related tasks. It’s secure and allows HR team to cut the reporting process in half with streamlined workflows implemented. In turn, it allows them to focus on business-critical objectives, rather than acting as data entry specialists.

You can easily set rules to generate required forms such as 1094-B, 1095-B, 1094-C and 1095-C directly into employee portals. Additionally, within these customized profiles, you can set up automated alerts too.

The platform is secure with two-factor authentication, intrusion detection systems, offsite backup facilities, built-in module layers for added security and more. Administrators can process raw data files, edit forms, automate e-filing, generate ALE/FTE forecasting and more within one system, allowing them to move from task-to-task easily.

The full platform includes the following HR modules: