Risk and Liability

Workplace law increasingly requires employers, controllers and principals to provide instruction and training to new and existing workers, whether they are labourers or professionals. Such law includes health and safety, equal employment opportunity, and harassment, just to name a few.

It is important to provide training and instruction that, where possible, is task and industry specific, whether in building, office work, local government, aged care, manufacturing, property, or others.

The absence of a robust system for compliance management can have grave consequences, including prosecution, loss of operating licenses, personal liability and even imprisonment for Senior Officers and Directors of companies.

Potential Risks
Risks occur when staff and contractors operating across the organisation are unaware of the prevailing operating requirements and their individual obligations. In the absence of such understanding, the law may be broken and a range of concerning outcomes may result.

This includes:

• The occurrence of workplace accidents and incidents
• The illegal disclosure of private information.
• Workplace bullying, discrimination and sexual harassment
• Malpractice and misconduct
• Collusive behaviour
• False or misleading advertising
• Improper security and emergency management
• Violation of operating license requirements
• Breaches of policies and procedures
• Financial mismanagement & breach of fiduciary duty
• Conflicts of interest

To meet compliance, your organisation must, amongst other things, have documented and demonstrated utilisation of operating processes, as well as procedures and training that addresses how you will operate under all circumstances. These must be current and understood by all relevant employees and contractors.

An effective compliance management methodology must not only deliver the right information and training, it must be delivered at the right time, in a consistent and controlled manner. The information delivered must be accurate and up to date. And, there must be validation that the information has been received and understood, with a complete audit trail.

Typically, manual methods fall short on a number of critical points:

• They do not enable essential information and training to be delivered to all employees and contractors exactly when and where required.
• They result in great delays in the time taken to update existing employee and contractor information and reach new employees. These delays set up critical exposures for your organisation where staff are operating without the requisite knowledge and training.
• They often result in inconsistent delivery of information and/or information that is out of date.
• They typically do not produce the necessary validation and audit trail.

Information provided by SRM Risk