Speaker 1: Hello everybody, welcome back. Eugene from CBS, Canadian Business Enterprise Services, and we continue our series of educational, informational, somewhat boring, somewhat interesting topics about companies, corporations, business activities in Canada, how to do it right, how to do it successful. So today we'll talk a little bit about compliance, and that is probably the most boring part of what I do, but as the reality develops I think it becomes more and more important one. If you look over the board on the South, their compliance is much more developed, the subject itself, the term, and more important. I think it's equally important in Canada, it's just we don't talk about it a lot, and somehow it's not being properly enforced, and people also don't know a lot about it. So what is compliance, why is it important? It's a very big, open, wide, and undetermined subject, but in my view compliance is something that makes your business operate within the boundaries of law, and it's not just for the sake of saying I comply with law. It's more for the sake of you going to sleep and doing it peacefully, quietly, knowing that you won't wake up tomorrow to some unnecessary, unexpected, and unwanted laws, lawsuits, claims, fines, penalties, investigations, articles in the newspaper, face of your company in the Facebook. Compliance has many faces, so you have statutory compliance, which means something that you must comply by law. In Ontario, by the way, every single business must comply with at least five different legal requirements. So they're simple and we'll talk about them down the road, but they're Employment Standards Act, Health and Safety, Human Rights, Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities, and Workplace Violence and Harassment. Those different types of laws that require a company to have certain documents, certain policies, and procedures to protect their employees and to provide them with certain rights and certain conditions at the workplace that are protective and respectful towards those employees. So if you have a business of a shoe repair store, coffee place, or automotive manufacturer, those fives are the very essential, basic, and the minimum that you must have. Why is it important except for just simply complying with the law? Because your name is important, because you don't want to be named as a person who did something or was a part of something very negative. So the very big name is reputation. Reputational risks are increasingly important for the organizations that you will work with. Banks, insurance companies, government, they would all check you before working with you whether you impose any reputational risks on them being involved with your business. In addition to that, compliance and doing things in the right way will provide a very simple thing. If something happens, you will be able to say, I've done everything right, or at least I've done my best to do everything right, or at least I instructed my employees, my partners, my workers to do everything right. That alone significantly improves your position if something wrong happens. And examples are unlimited. I won't bring them today, I won't bring them maybe in these videos. But please trust me, there are lots of them. They also help you. Compliance, in addition to just protecting your business, makes your business more efficient. What I always like to say is that we all today know that our employees are supposed to know what they're supposed to do. So a welder at the plant is supposed to do that he's doing a welding job at the plant, and he's supposed to be good at it, competent. What we lose in many cases is that those people also supposed to know what they're not supposed to do. That is the main source of liabilities to many of legal claims and many of exposures of your business. So if that welder would not know that he's not supposed to deal with electrical equipment in the case of electrical failure, your business will become liable if something happens to you. Your business will become directly exposed if that welder deals with electrical equipment and gets injured. Compliance gives you the answer to those problems. A. You train your people. You make sure they understand what they're supposed to do, what they're not supposed to do. B. You put the boundaries. C. You create predictability. For your own sake, you will know that your people are not going to get engaged in the activities where they're not competent, and they cannot mitigate the damages. The last side of compliance is efficiency. The simplest example of that is vacation form. How many employers among us have to deal on a daily basis with questions of employees? How do you go to vacation? How many days do I have? How many days am I left? How do I ask for vacation? Why can't I go tomorrow for vacation? Or any other question. So putting simple policy that defines rules of how to take vacation, how many days with which ahead notice, will eliminate two-thirds of those questions. Putting a form next to policy with a request for vacation would eliminate a lot of unnecessary verbal interaction between you or your managers and employees. It will release your time into developing your business. It will help your employees to know that what they do, they do by the book, by the procedure. It will make your operations more efficient, more predictable, all together more protected. So it's a dry subject. I can make it less dry, but still it would be boring. I think that if anyone that watches this video thinks about becoming just a little bit more than what is a very unfavorite name, mom's and pop shop, if you think about yourself becoming a corporation, a business that grows, that provides workplaces for other people, that has potential to become the superstar on the market, you should start on paying attention to compliance from the first day. You don't have to spend much time, you don't have to spend much money on it, you don't have to have 50,000 documents defining every single action of your employees, if you just don't have an employee. But you have to keep in mind that as you grow, as you expand, those documents, policies, and procedures will help you to create the foundation for the future building. So as you grow, come to us, we'll help you, we'll do it, we'll produce the documents step-by-step, constantly aware of your current situation, where you want to be tomorrow. That's more or less it. So follow us, subscribe, leave your comments, ask your questions, like us if you like. We'll talk more, a little bit more about compliance here. There's lots of information on our website www.cbes.ca. We constantly publish some additional information about that, so be sure to follow us and to subscribe to get some updates about our future videos. Thank you.