Originally posted April 11, 2013 Managing HR in the Age of Acronyms | WeKnowNext.com.

For HR professionals, ensuring their company maintains compliance with all regulatory requirements is a key aspect of the job and necessary to avoid compliance issues and the resulting penalties. Yet, it is easy to get lost in all of the legal verbiage and numerous acronyms; keeping track of policies like FMLA, ADA, ADAAA, ENDA, FSLA, ADEA, IRCA, ERISA may have you asking: HUH?

In an environment of increasing regulations, HR needs to ensure its operations throughout the talent management lifecycle – recruitment, interviewing, compensation, time off and termination – are in accordance with all state and federal legislation. However, complying with these laws is much more than avoiding lawsuits. Organizations that perform these processes manually will continue to find themselves drowning in paperwork and administrative duties at a time when HR is under growing pressure to do more with less and enhance  their value to the entire company.

Fortunately, many talent management suites include compliance management capabilities. These enable HR practitioners to automate their compliance processes, eliminating much of the time and effort spent on administrative tasks and removing the chance of error when such processes are handled manually. The right solution should be able to monitor and track all processes to provide a complete audit trail and minimize legal risk, while ensuring the company remains up to date and in compliance with the latest state and federal regulations.

While such a solution can improve the company’s ability to comply with all regulations, HR professionals face another challenge: communicating why such a solution is necessary. Just like financial teams don’t highlight their results with the fact that the company passed a tax audit and marketing doesn’t focus on results of their SEO efforts but how they position the brand, the same holds true for HR. Talking about how the company can comply with the numerous acronyms won’t resonate with people who don’t live and breathe HR. The key is to highlight how these processes benefit the company as a whole and can add to the bottom line, by streamlining processes and avoiding the financial risk of non-compliance. The specifics and acronyms should stay in the back office where they belong.

Meeting compliance with all legal regulations is a major part of the HR function, but it is not the main focus of what we do. By implementing a solution to ease the process, HR can ensure compliance with all legislation, enable the company to minimize regulatory risk and allow HR to devote more time to its main function: finding the best employees for the organization, and making sure they stay there.