When HR partners with other leaders, compliance can stop being just firefighting and become part of organizational strategy
Treating compliance as an investment in culture, growth and resilience, rather than a chore or a cost centre, is key to aligning an organization’s compliance practices with its overall business strategy.
That’s according to Nhi Huynh, an employment lawyer at Williams HR Law in the Greater Toronto Area.
HR leaders know the pressure of managing compliance, because many feel that they’re “treating everything like everything's on fire all at once and feeling quite overwhelmed,” says Huynh. However, the other extreme is where “compliance really isn't on the organization's mind because of the same thing where they're overwhelmed in terms of their day-to-day operations until complaints or investigations force the issue,” she says.
Making compliance support the business
Somewhere in the middle is where compliance can be deliberately shaped to advance business strategy instead of fighting it, according to Huynh.
“You want to strike a balance where you're aligning your business objectives and your compliance obligations,” she says. “And making sure you're going in the direction of your business objectives, look at compliance not as something that would get in the way of those objectives, but support those objectives and help you grow in the direction that you want to grow.”
Kierston Amos, a partner at McInnes Cooper in Halifax, sees the same divide in organizations with which she works. She notes that many smaller organizations in her region of Atlantic Canada still approach their obligations from a mindset of “'How do I not get into trouble and am I meeting what I need to?' and not necessarily leveraging it for the employee experience and how to develop broader strategies around it.”
“There's a maturity spectrum on where employers are, and I suspect there is still a lot who would be approaching compliance more from, ‘I've got to get it done,’ and it's a checklist, versus ‘We're going to have to do this, but how do we roll that into our future employees and strategies?'” adds Amos.
Beyond firefighting to focused risk
When everything is urgent, nothing is strategic, and Huynh sees that as a challenge for HR leaders who are juggling performance issues, conflict resolution, accommodation requests, and shifting cultural expectations at the same time. She describes leaders who are “managing a lot of complaints, competing priorities” while responding to flexible work demands and cultural shifts.
Amos sees the same pattern when, after an incident, employers commission a training session or update a policy, but, she says, “one and done isn’t going to fix it.”
“Approaching the compliance stuff, particularly around safety and the employee experience, if you're only focused on it at one point in time to make sure you get it done, you haven't built the concept or the principle into your regular cadence,” says Amos. “If you need to ensure, let's say, a mentally strong and resilient workplace, you need to actually build out a plan where you're continually talking about and improving upon it — otherwise, you’ll just have the compliance check box rather than leveraging it as a strategy for the workplace.”
Organizations should confirm whether the system in place is still appropriate or needs adjustment, says Huynh.
“Compliance systems and strategies should evolve alongside the organization, whether that’s remote work, AI tools, restructuring, or expansion into new jurisdictions.”
Agile frameworks and staying informed
Legal and regulatory change is constant, and Huynh says that organizations can’t expect internal teams to track every statute, regulation and court decision on their own.
“A lot of these things are complex things that need to be digested, and strategic organizations rely on trusted legal advisors to translate any legal change or any court decision into how it might impact the organization,” she says. “HR can understand at a high level what areas might be changing and what changes might be relevant to their operations and growth plans — but understanding the nitty gritty, if you need to ask for help, definitely ask for help with that.”
Huynh notes that leadership teams sometimes overestimate their internal knowledge, time, and resources. “Strategic compliance involves knowing your limitations, and proactive organizations involve experts and legal advisors early to prevent issues,” she says. “The cost of obtaining advice is often significantly lower than the cost of getting it wrong.”
Huynh believes that that when the basics are clear, HR can spend its energy on how a new rule affects products, locations, or workforce design instead of getting swallowed by technicalities.
“Good systems in place where there's clear ownership of who's responsible for what should be laid out and properly understood by leadership, so that employees understand if there's something they need to escalate.”
Amos agrees that policy frameworks must anticipate change, especially around things like hybrid work, digital tools, and privacy. “If you're building your compliance framework and you're addressing compliance issues, you need to be clear but you also need to make sure it's not chiseled in stone in the sense that the process and the function in which you evaluate, determine whether or not it needs to evolve,” says Amos. “We should be expecting change, so as we address the current changes, we shouldn't be thinking that this isn't necessarily going to need to change again and it’s rock solid.”
Make policies match reality
Huynh also believes that if policies don’t reflect how people actually work, they won’t be followed. “The best policies will be tailored to be reflective of how the organization is actually working, but managers have to make sure that they're understanding the actual realities of the workplace and HR professionals don't want to be caught flat-footed in terms of not having the realities of their organization reflected in the policy,” she says.
As an example, Huynh points to practical tools like employee checkins, time recording, and other systems that create visibility without sliding into surveillance, but only add value if HR first takes the time to understand the realities of the workplace and designs processes around what employees need and how they get work done.
Training also has to move beyond HR into the daily work of leaders and frontline staff, says Huynh.
“It's good to train employees to treat compliance as an organizational responsibility as a whole, rather than just an HR issue, and encouraging them to speak up will help create a culture where issues can surface and can be looked at before they actually become escalated disputes or legal claims,” she says. “And make sure that managers not only understand everything, but are applying everything consistently — if they apply policies selectively, that will undermine compliance and employee trust.”
HR as a strategic partner
Another shift requires senior leaders to rethink how they see HR itself, and when HR is treated as a genuine strategic partner, compliance stops being a last-minute obstacle and becomes part of decision-making from the outset, according to Amos.
“With respect to their relationship with HR, you see more of an understanding and appreciation that HR isn't an administrative, operational function — it can be one of your biggest strategies, particularly if your workplace is one that relies on people for services,” she says. “A lot of HR professionals have it already, but other operational leaders can shift to understanding that HR isn’t just a cost centre and an administrative function, but that they’re a strategic partner in developing the workplace culture and the employee experience.”
That mindset recognizes that robust, well-implemented compliance saves money by reducing turnover, preventing conflicts and avoiding disruption, even if the return doesn’t show up as a neat line item on a sales report, says Huynh.
“Making sure it's embedded in the planning part and the decision-making before anything happens, will help reduce risk and conflict,” she says. “Investing in compliance is actually going to help you save on costs in the long run, as you’re not going to have to deal with fines and significant damages, and if you're running a business that's compliant, you're also avoiding disruptions.”
Huynh stresses that compliance works best when it’s collaborative. “Compliance can’t sit with HR alone; it must be owned by leadership across the organization,” she says. “We’ve seen situations where business leaders understand their role but simply don’t share relevant information, and so [HR leaders] can only work with what is in front of them.”
This article is part of our Monthly Spotlight series, which in January focuses on employment law. Full coverage can be found here.
