Companies are grappling with countless challenges as they navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. From layoffs to work-from-home mandates, businesses are drastically reshaping their structures and workflows to ensure survival during these uncertain economic times.
These organizational shifts bring with them a bevy of compliance challenges. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Department of Labor are aggressively pursuing EEO enforcement during the pandemic. Through a series of public announcements, the organizations have made it clear that they aren’t just watching employers — they are also encouraging employees to report any alleged mistreatment.
Though the pandemic has, in some ways, changed how the EEOC investigates complaints of discrimination, the process is still one your company should strive to avoid. Simply put, compliance professionals may always not meet a legal definition of essential workers these days, but make no mistake — they are essential to your business.
Particularly as workplaces evolve in coming months, compliance professionals can oversee a company’s virtual environment to ensure it remains free of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. This is easier said than done, of course. Countless new conversation venues and information flows have cropped up during the pandemic. Consider all of the Zoom meetings that occur every day with minimal corporate visibility. In these unique circumstances, a compliance function needs to work extra hard to spot potential problems and fix them before employees potentially report them to the EEOC.
This is no time to neglect your compliance focus. Instead, you should recognize the many compliance challenges your company will face in the foreseeable future. To limit your legal risk:
Ultimately, EEO enforcement hasn’t wavered. And neither should you in maintaining compliance.