How Visitor Management helps with Social Compliance?

What is Social Compliance?

Social compliance is a set of steps you can take to measure how a company is performing to ensure the equality, safety and fair treatment of its employees. Although it’s not a current official standard to comply with, it provides organisations with a way to gain a better reputation for their work towards becoming more socially conscious and actually implement measures to prove it.

This type of compliance can be performed across many different industries. However it’s primarily targeted towards industries that traditionally have not had a great track record in maintaining a level of social responsibility. These being industries like manufacturing, supply chain and construction, where poor safety conditions have been prevalent. 

Equality also plays a big part in becoming more socially compliant. Employers need to be more aware and make definite steps towards showing better equality for their employees, and be proactive in creating better workplace cultures of inclusion and fairness.

Some of the areas which are assessed when going through a social compliance audit are:

• Child labour laws
• Forced labour laws
• Discrimination laws
• Minimum wage laws
• Worker living standards
• Working hours
• Overtime wages
• Social benefits
• Safety and health
• Protection of the environment

These areas are more commonly assessed by the local authorities and preparations for an audit to receive compliance is usually performed with a third party organisation, such as HQTS, who were founded in 1987 and have a strong track record in helping organisations across countries like China, India, Vietnam and Bangladesh.

How to conduct a social audit

HQTS’s recommendation on how to conduct a social audit is in these six steps:

1. Review your company’s code of conduct and its code of ethics.
2. Define your company’s “stakeholders” by identifying every individual or group that is affected by the performance or success of your business.
3. Identify the social needs that affect all of your company’s stakeholders, including people behaviours, such as crime and vagrancy reduction.
4. Devise a system for identifying social targets, gathering data on addressing an issue and implementing strategies to positively affect the situation and reporting the results of those efforts.
5. Contract with an independent auditing firm that specializes in social responsibility programs; meet with representatives of the audit firm to discuss your efforts and your need for an independent review.
6. Allow the auditor to complete the independent verification process and then compare his results with the internal observations of the functional group leading your social responsibility effort.

To understand more about how you can achieve social compliance in Australia, you can also visit the SGS standards organization website at www.sgs.com.au. SGS helps organizations with Social Auditing and has a range of specialist social responsibility services that include undertaking a series of audits against a range of internationally recognised codes and standards to help you assess your compliance against the latest, most stringent requirements.

A range of audits can be performed to help you achieve your goals, which include the ISO Standard 26000, Code of Conduct, Ethical Trading, Compliance and Sustainability and the Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production (WRAP)

Visitor Management helping you with Social Compliance

The impact of the covid19 and the pandemic has seen a huge shift in working patterns, with the trend of many people opting to work from home, however Hybrid working has also raised some challenges for employers.  As mentioned above it’s forcing organisations to be more aware of how employees are treated, and a shift towards flexible working and safer workplaces. This is where social responsibility and visitor management comes together. 

Visitor management solutions can help make the workplace safer and easier to navigate through providing contactless entry and monitoring movements in buildings and other worksites. A good visitor management system should also help identify employee workloads and movements as well as encourage health and safety practices like mandating safe working distances.

Here are some additional benefits that can be gained with implementing a visitor, contractor or employee sign-in solution:

• Contactless sign-ins – keeping it safe through eliminating paper log books and reducing the amount of touched surfaces by providing mobile apps and QR code scanning to check-in to sites.
• Screening visitors and contractors – Screening through electronic questionnaires and asking compliance questions will reduce the risk of people arriving and entering the sites if they are infectious or have been in recent contact with others.
• Workplace compliance – Meeting regulatory workplace compliances by providing inductions and instructions in the event of an emergency, as well as providing the employer with a record of who’s entered the site so they can notify visitors to evacuate.
• Monitoring staff timesheets – A check-in and out mobile app can help employers understand how long their employees are working. This is actually a work-safe requirement. If people are working long shifts or multiple shifts, this can pose a risk to them and to others.  
• Desk and meeting room booking – By providing a way to allocate desks which are properly distanced apart will go a long way towards preventing the spread of infections and will also help organisations comply with government regulations for any future health related events.

There’s a trend globally and across different industries of organisations becoming more socially responsible. This means raising the bar when it comes to employee/employer relationships and improving in the areas of fairness, ethical responsibility and safer working conditions. 

By implementing visitor management software, which has the right features will be an essential tool in becoming a good corporate citizen and brings you one step closer to becoming socially compliant, not to mention the benefits of having a happier workforce as well.

Feel free to speak to us about how we can help you achieve your social responsibility goals. 

Sources: www.hqts.com, www.sgs.com.au