Keeping Up With Compliance Trends 2024

Occupational health and safety standards continue to evolve with new best practices and innovative technologies that help shape the way today’s employees work. As the employer, you’re responsible for providing a safe work environment free from harassment, accidents, and injuries and ensuring satisfied, productive employees. 

Every work environment, from warehouse to processing plant or construction site to office space, has various hazards that put employees at risk. But advances in digital technology have made way for predictive and assistive tools that create stronger collaboration and decision-making to improve safety significantly.

Compliance trends don’t just speak to the physical safety of workers. Workplace compliance also includes company, customer, and third-party data security. Data protection is crucial in today’s non-stop digital world and has become a top business priority as cybercrime has increased exponentially.

Digital transformations continue to evolve, especially in areas like mobile connectivity, predictive analytics, and cyber security, making upholding compliance paramount to any business’s long-term success. Read on to learn the top compliance trends to watch for in 2024, including new requirements, the challenges you may face, and how mobile inspection software can alleviate frustrations and keep you at the forefront of navigating the regulatory environment..

Compliance Trend #1: Enhanced Employee Engagement

Organizations with a strong safety culture have realized its value in recent years, thanks to employees collaborating to maintain and promote a safe work environment. This trend will continue if businesses keep involving their employees in their health and safety processes while empowering them to raise concerns about potential risks or hazards in the workplace. 

Employee feedback, involving the entire team in decision-making, and comprehensive safety training help shape workplace health and safety procedures and policies. Putting the right intuitive tools in the hands of employees allows them to participate in keeping each other safe,  increasing engagement, and strengthening the company culture. 

Compliance Trend #2: Increase In Cybercrime

Unfortunately, the cybercrime forecast for the year 2030 is expected to reach $500 billion. That’s a significant increase from 2022, when it hit $200 billion, according to Grand View Research. This massive increase is thanks to bad actors who buy the knowledge, software, and tools to commit these financially devastating crimes.

Businesses must do their due diligence with security compliance because the odds have drastically tipped from if it will happen to when. Customers are far more confident doing business with you when they see standardized and documented security frameworks that are compliant and properly executed.

Higher cybercrime means your team must discover risks faster. Speeding up the process usually requires scaling compliance programs, which is challenging if you don’t have the right software to standardize processes. In addition, introducing new frameworks requires a clear picture of outlining gaps while simultaneously leveraging your current program. 

Once you adopt multiple frameworks, your goal is to assess your data collection only once and comply with many or all of your processes. This streamlined compliance assessment workflow eliminates duplication and tedious manual tasks while improving collaboration.

Compliance Trend #3: Digital Transformation and Relying on Third Parties is Accelerating

Today’s digital landscape transformed at an unprecedented rate changing how some companies do business. According to McKinsey & Company, what would typically take five to ten years to accomplish, the global pandemic pushed digital transformations to progress in six months. With many businesses expanding their digital footprint, there’s now more data to protect and more data for bad actors to access, leading to new risks for companies to navigate.

Data is no longer under company control as third parties are standard for most organizations. Therefore, enhancing risk management efforts and internally deployed protections is now a top priority. 

With the landscape evolving so quickly, companies face more and more challenges with remaining flexible and being ready for their next move. However, scaling programs with the right software solution can create a centralized inventory, enable continuous monitoring, build enhanced control measure management, and improve third-party risk assessments. Learning about issues faster will improve your reaction time with continuous control measure monitoring across different assets, especially in light of regulatory changes. 

Compliance Trend #4: More Demand for Cybersecurity Solutions

With growing cybercrime comes higher expectations from regulators, standards setters, and customers regarding sufficient cybersecurity. The regulators and standard setters are trying to keep up with the ever-changing environment while customers demand compliance with an expanding list of standard security frameworks. 

New versions of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS) and ISO 27001 and 27002 were released last year, and this year, there are five states, Colorado, California, Utah, Virginia, and Connecticut, aiming for new enactments or updates in their state data privacy laws. With an increased focus on data privacy, including regulations such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), there is a growing demand for cybersecurity solutions to protect personal information. Managing multiple versions of different overlapping frameworks alongside compliance programs is incredibly complex.

It’s integral for companies looking to expand or retain their customer base to maintain compliance with their framework requirements, including regulatory compliance. Senior management is becoming more involved because of cybersecurity’s enormous impact on their businesses. They want more comprehensive reporting, program visibility, and accountability that ensures an effective control environment. Compliance frameworks, including those for data protection, need to evolve to accommodate new regulations and cybersecurity threats. Framework adoption has never been easier with the right compliance management software to streamline gap assessments and automate framework mapping to meet compliance requirements and avoid potential financial penalties and reputational damage.

Compliance Trend #5: Struggling For Talent  

The sudden need for heightened cybersecurity and compliance has heated up the competition  for IT talent. Security professionals have become a hot commodity with the expanding digital market. Even with a recession looming, there isn’t enough talent to fill all the vacant positions. According to Fortune, there are over 700,000 unfilled positions in the cybersecurity sector. 

But organizations can’t rely on using “lack of talent” as an excuse for not keeping up with the demand for increased compliance. Operating at limited capacities because of insufficient staffing requires teams to increase efficiencies and leverage digital solutions for tedious manual tasks.

Cybersecurity has become a company-wide effort, including senior managers and board members. Manual processes can no longer support a fully or partially staffed cybersecurity team when it comes to meeting the compliance and security practices of the organization. The good news is, implementing the right software solution can improve workflows, streamline and automate data collection, and simplify workplace integrations, enabling compliance professionals to focus on making meaningful impacts with strategic business decisions and staying up-to-date with constantly evolving security policies and compliance trends, including the increasing threat of cyber attacks. With the rise of generative AI and compliance automation, companies can now easily stay on top of their compliance requirements and confidently navigate audits and compliance efforts, thanks to the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Compliance Trend #6: Advancements in Predictive Analytics

The key to preventative safety measures is having reliable data. When you can easily identify risks and spot gaps quickly by analyzing reliable data from past inspections, risk assessments, incidents, and audits, you can better prevent accidents and injuries by running analytics from previous near misses and safety observations. With enhanced analytical tools, your safety leaders can identify high-risk processes and locations, rank them based on frequency and severity, and handle them based on priority.

Leveraging historical safety data with advanced predictive analytics creates models that forecast the location, frequency, and likelihood of workplace injuries. Advanced analytics turns your safety data into an invaluable asset with end-to-end workflows and seamless processes that communicate with one another while the data sits in one convenient centralized location. 

Compliance Trend #7: Improved Mobile Connectivity

Mobile usage has increased drastically, improving communication and connectivity. With nearly everyone having access to a smartphone these days, more and more businesses are using digital safety management systems for their inspections and audits, incident reporting, and observation recording.   

As organizations improve their safety numbers with mobile solutions, they can implement better safety procedures and practices, bridge data gaps, enhance internal communication, and take advantage of offline capabilities. Continuous monitoring and communication through digital technologies provide added measures to identify vulnerabilities in processes or infrastructure.

Making Compliance Easy, One Click at a Time

Technological advancements are constantly in motion. And 2024 will be a year of more innovation, specifically in areas like data access, process enhancements, and predictive analytics. 

Companies must ignore compliance minimums and instead, build internal solutions with the future in mind to improve processes and protect data with scalable and integrative tools. Improving data collection workflows, mapping controls, reducing manual tasks, streamlining framework adoption efforts, and eliminating redundant and duplicate tasks can position your company to minimize talent gaps, strengthen its security, and create reliable data with customizable dashboards. These transformation efforts are crucial in keeping up with compliance trends and regulatory requirements, and ensuring compliance is easy and efficient for your company’s workload and resilience.

monitorQA tackles compliance head-on with a flexible, intuitive, and fully customizable digital solution built for collaboration. Designed for on-the-go mobile users, our advanced mobile inspection software, trusted by businesses nationwide, improves your health, safety, and quality standards with immersive technology that gets your entire team onboard and improves your bottom line. 

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