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From the Experts: How to Audit Your Organization For Employee Risk
In this week’s episode of America Back to Work, S2Verify co-founder and chief strategy officer, Arnette Heintze, sat down with Patrick Rogan, founder and managing director of IgnitionHR, a business offering HR services, leadership, and risk audits. Before founding his agency in 2016, Patrick served as director of recruiting at EY, director of HR at Watson Wyatt, and then chief talent officer at DCI group.
In his conversation with Heintze, Rogan shared his top tips for managing HR risk through uncertain economic times (and in the midst of a labor crisis)—a topic we covered earlier this week on the blog. Additionally, he pointed to the ways that remote work—especially across state lines—is complicating HR risk by increasing the rate of compliance issues for organizations.
To minimize risk in the current conditions and ensure that all bases are covered, Rogan recommends conducting an HR risk audit. While most companies start this process after something bad has happened, he urges employers to proactively conduct an audit, given the likelihood that something might go wrong.
According to Rogan, a comprehensive HR risk audit includes looking into transactional HR (record keeping, benefits, payroll, compliance), talent risk (recruiting, talent management, learning and development, staff alignment), and governance and strategy (succession planning, change management, mergers and acquisitions).
“Ask a gazillion questions, look through tons of documentation, and build a report that’s color-coded,” says Rogan about conducting an audit. From there, organizations will be equipped with the right data to prioritize threats and take meaningful actions against them.
One of those meaningful actions? Pre-employment screening, which Rogan believes will become more common and more rigorous in the face of “distributed work environments,” a.k.a. the rise of remote work.
He even advocates for continuous screening over the course of the employee lifecycle so that organizations can get better at spotting employee threats before they become a crisis.
Get more expert tips on how to build a successful HR risk management strategy through times of change. Click here to listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.