The hospitality and retail industries have the unenviable distinction of topping the lists of highest turnover rates. The hotel industry has an annual turnover rate of 74%, and retail has about 2.5 million more job vacancies than job seekers. While there may be all kinds of reasons for the high turnover rates, one thing is certain: it’s leaving your compliance program in chaos.
In the hospitality and retail industries, compliance management happens at two levels: corporate and individual location (which for the sake of ease during this blog, we will refer to as franchise). It is important to note that these individual locations (franchises) may truly be franchise locations, or they could be corporate owned.
At the corporate level, there’s a lot less turnover to disrupt your security/compliance program. But your corporate personnel depend on reliable contributions from the franchise locations — where turnover is constant. And that introduces greater risk to your entire company.
At the corporate level, there’s the core group that handles the majority of the heavy lifting for security and compliance. If you lose one of them, you lose a ton of skills and knowledge in a single individual. You have the huge task of getting their replacement up to speed, and it will require a large investment of training over an extended period — but it’s just one person.
At the franchise level, you have dozens to hundreds of locations, and each one of them is losing employees at a frenetic clip. Their compliance responsibilities are small compared to the corporate-level professional, but the frequent churn has a tremendous multiplier effect. That means you’re continually training new employees to perform compliance management tasks at the franchise level.
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Let’s explore the compliance management pains you have in a high-turnover environment, and how a compliance management system can dramatically ease the burden.
The Business Impact of Compliance Management
Your franchise location managers need to keep the hotel or the store running smoothly. Their efforts should be focused on operations, training and managing employees, and keeping customers happy. Compliance activities are perceived as a distraction from their “real jobs.” So the more streamlined and consistent you can make compliance activities, the more successful your business will be in managing compliance efficiently while also keeping your business humming along.
Do you want those boots-on-the-ground people,who are critical to running your business, wasting multiple hours each? Or would you rather have them spend those multiple hours making a guest happy, hiring new staff, or connecting with local business chambers? There are more productive uses for their time.
The right compliance management tool can provide requests that are easy to understand, written in a way that makes sense to the personnel within your organization, and leverage a simple workflow that saves tremendous time and eliminates frustration.
How much time? Many of our clients reduce their manual labor on compliance management by as much as 65 percent.
At the franchisee level, it may be a few hours per location — but multiply those hours by the number of locations you have, and that time savings translates to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. That’s easily a full employee’s salary.
The time and money savings per person at the corporate level is substantially more pronounced.
Compliance Management Training Programs Are Costly
High employee turnover means you’re constantly spending time (and money) on compliance management training. It’s a significant investment to get a new hire up to speed on compliance activities. Every time someone leaves, it’s like Groundhog Day — you have to provide the same training and walk into the same walls all over again.
Getting up to speed isn’t as simple as a 15-minute walkthrough with a handbook to refer to. It can take weeks to adequately onboard a new hire in compliance management. It also requires a higher level of oversight for a period of time, so you can do QA and validate that they properly understand their role.
Not everyone at the local franchise locations needs to be trained for compliance management activities, but you do need to have some key people on-site to fill the role. Chances are, only store managers will be involved in gathering and submitting compliance evidence. That said, it is critical that those managers be well trained for the compliance activities you depend on them to do.
In many cases, it makes sense to provide a combination of deployed training modules and hands-on training. Without a doubt, your compliance training will be much more effective if you can provide experiential training.
It’s one thing to read a manual about how to fly an airplane — it’s quite another to actually sit in the cockpit and take control of the throttle. The same is true when it comes to compliance management activities — the more you can learn by doing, the more it will make sense.
Compliance Management Is Confusing and Time Consuming
Performing compliance activities isn’t like riding a bike — it’s easy to forget from one year to the next how to do it.
- What evidence needs to be provided again?
- What was it last year that you provided?
- The Assessor rejected the first three versions of evidence you submitted — what was it that finally passed muster?
- Where are you supposed to locate the evidence you need to submit?
- How are you supposed to deliver your evidence?
There’s a whole plethora of information that’s easily forgotten from one compliance cycle to the next. And unless your store managers are really good notetakers, they’ll likely make the same mistakes and missteps as they did last year — creating bottlenecks in a time-sensitive process and wasting valuable man-hours. Every time.
These delays are multiplied when dealing with the complexity of evidence collection across franchise locations and are a substantial drag on your corporate personnel who get the joy of “herding the compliance cats.”
In a high-turnover industry, the problem is exacerbated by employees and managers who have never had to collect compliance evidence before. They may not even have someone at their location who can show them how it’s done.
But the right compliance management system makes the submission requirements clear and simple. For example, TCT Portal provides historical lookbacks with just a click. You can see what was provided last year and what passed muster with the Assessor. You can also leverage customized guidance within the platform that explains exactly what your staff needs to provide and how to submit it.
Whether you have a veteran employee or a newbie collecting evidence, TCT Portal makes it easy to figure out exactly what items are needed, how to gather them, and how to submit them. This single component gives your franchisees a huge leg up. It makes compliance management activities tremendously less stressful and onerous, because they can get it right the first time, every time.
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Evidence Submission Woes
Without the right compliance tool, high-turnover franchisees are destined to submit garbage for evidence, and to submit it incorrectly. That means the compliance personnel at the corporate level have a rat’s nest of files and chaos to sort through.
The more franchises you have submitting garbage, the more painful it is at the corporate level. Evidence is constantly getting rejected and sent back, files need to be tracked down endlessly, and franchisees need to be continually trained (and retrained) on how to do their compliance activities.
This is a common story, it happens all the time. As a result, operational overhead becomes huge, draining valuable resources, costing valuable money, and creating enormous headaches.
A compliance management system like TCT Portal helps ensure that people know what they’re supposed to do, how to do it, and when it’s due. The onboarding for new personnel is incredibly fast, and first-time submitters can be successful on Day One. The system allows evidence submitters across the organization to be self-reliant.
Regain Efficiencies with TCT Portal
Not only does TCT Portal make compliance management suck less right off the blocks, it actually gets even better in Year 2, when you see another big leap of gains in efficiency. When you switch to TCT Portal, your first assessment cycle is spent learning new things and building your repository of information that will benefit you for years to come.
In Year 1, you’re building your repository. In Year 2, you put that same repository into action. One of the biggest efficiencies that starts in year two is Operational Mode. Operational Mode prompts your internal team to perform maintenance tasks throughout the period until your next annual assessment.
There are certain things that need to be done every day, every week, every month, every quarter, twice a year, once a year. Operational Mode keeps you on track and ensures that nothing slips through the cracks so you don’t get blindsided with an unpleasant surprise during your next annual assessment.
This is huge in an industry with high employee turnover rates, because you don’t have to worry about keeping track of who did what. The system’s automation keeps track for you, and it sends automated reminders to those responsible for submitting evidence, for every task that needs to be completed.
Organizations that use Operational Mode have waved good-bye to the four or five month sprint of chaos before their annual audit. There’s no more rush to gather up evidence that should have been gathered months ago, or track down missing documents.
Better yet, this functionality allows the organization to stay on track and correct any issues in near real time throughout the compliance cycle. They save time, effort, operational costs, and wasted anxiety.
Assessors won’t audit every hotel or retail location, which means you’re going into the audit without knowing which stores have been selected. Will you get blindsided by a franchise that hasn’t been keeping up with their compliance tasks?
TCT’s Operational Mode is designed to prevent that. Imagine what it will feel like to walk into your annual compliance assessment without the fear that the Assessor picked a location that doesn’t have its act together. You don’t need to have the annual anxiety surrounding which stores the Assessor selects, you can walk into your annual Assessment with confidence.
Every location is always prepared.
Related: The Best PCI-DSS Compliance Management Tool for Franchises
Compliance Management Doesn’t Have to Suck
For hotels and retail stores that experience high employee turnover, it’s critical to make compliance management quick to learn, easy to do and readily repeatable. If nothing else, making the work less painful helps reduce the churn. It also reduces your operational costs across your dozens to hundreds of locations.
The other advantage to an easy and streamlined system is the immediate effectiveness your new employees can provide. Even if you have them for a short period of time, the more value you can get from their compliance activities the first time around, the better.
Better employee effectiveness means reduced operational costs, fewer unpleasant surprises during an audit, and fewer undetected security risks.
Isn’t it time to make compliance management suck less — and cost less — at your high turnover business? Request a personalized demo today and discover what TCT Portal can do for your company.
