Keeping Your Business Safe and Compliant
A lot of people work extremely hard to build their businesses, yet it doesn’t take much for all that hard work to fall apart if you don’t keep your business safe and compliant.
When you have worked SO hard to build up your business, the last thing you want is for it to be destroyed by a safety, security or compliance issue. In the majority of cases, these risks can easily be foreseen and therefore managed.
Unfortunately, however, it’s only usually in hindsight that business owners can look back and wish they had done something differently, and usually by this point it’s too late, as they are looking back as a result of a disastrous situation that has triggered them to be reflective.
This article, therefore, looks at a number of ways to proactively keep your business safe and compliant.
- Employees
From a security perspective, your employees should be taking care of your business rather than being seen as a potential threat to the safety and security of your enterprise, but make no mistake – a lot of times, particularly within retail, it is the staff themselves that account for a large proportion of theft.
The other thing to consider, is that an employee can have the best of intentions but still be negligent and this negligence can open you up to a huge lawsuit that could destroy your business.
The other thing to consider is that is can be a good idea to incorporate aspects of security into your regular staff meetings, as by educating your staff on common security threats these threats can be neutralised, as a team. Indeed, most security breaches happen due to staff being complacent, therefore, bringing them up in regular meetings can emphasise the need to remain alert.
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- Be compliant with all relevant codes and laws
This might seem like an obvious point, but if you’re not keeping up to date with your taxes or there are accuracy issues, this could land you in serious hot water; whether it was intentional or not. That said, being compliant isn’t limited to obvious issues such as health and safety at work, tax compliance, or discrimination issues. There are hidden aspects such as backflow testing which is important to ensure the sanitation of water you supply to your premises which could be consumed by staff and customers alike.
- Get good insurance
A decent business insurance policy is worth its weight in gold, as whilst it can feel painful to part with the monthly premiums, in the case of a costly emergency having this safety net has an incredible amount of value; particularly if you’re running a small business or just getting started and growing your business from an acorn stage, meaning don’t have the cashflow security of larger business in order to weather the storm.
- Protect your data with the Cloud
Protecting your data in the modern world is extremely important, not just from a compliance perspective, but on the basis all your “good stuff” is usually stored on a computer – whether this is marketing material, business plans or customer records. You might want to think about using a cloud storage application such as Google Drive in order to keep files safe.
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