e all know about the great migration to “work from home” that occurred during COVID-19 pandemic starting in 2020 and lasting into 2021 and 2022. While many organizations have moved employees back to the office for some or part of the work week, the remote work movement has remained a far more prevalent aspect of working life.
According to a 2023 Pew Research Center study, around 22 million employed adults in the U.S. work from home all the time, equal to roughly 14 percent of all employed adults, while 41 percent are at least part-time remote on a hybrid setup. By 2025, that same survey finds 32.6 million Americans will be working remotely.
While the flexibility creates favorable conditions for the acquisition and retention of top talent, it also contributes to some new challenges. Managing a compliance team in a remote work environment can be difficult. This is especially true for highly regulated sectors, such as finance, health care, defense, and others, but it could impact a business operating in any field.
Identifying the challenges of remote work and coming up with a solid compliance plan will allow employers and workers to fully utilize remote or hybrid work models without worries about security risks, audits, or subsequent fines. Whether or not you utilize a third-party risk monitoring solution, it’s critical to understand the risks associated with remote work.
Compliance Challenges of a Remote Work Environment
The EY 2023 Mobility Re-imagined Survey suggests that while 92 percent of participants believe workplace mobility is important, 71 percent lack confidence in their organization’s ability to handle compliance and other risks stemming from a remote work environment.
Some of the most common compliance challenges work from home creates for organizations include:
- Determining which labor laws and regulations apply to employees on the basis of their home office location
- Employee monitoring and oversight
- Ensuring workplace safety
- Data security and privacy
- Safety of communication carried out in a remote work environment
- Employment verification processes
Having a solid compliance plan in place and adapting to the hybrid work model realities are both essential to mitigate those risks.
Onboarding and Ongoing Training
The first rule of onboarding compliance is understanding applicable rules regarding employment, data privacy, and security. Onboarding processes have to address all those concerns and adhere to regulatory frameworks within the respective jurisdiction.
If your company hires international employees who work from their own location, you’ll have to go through a few important considerations when doing onboarding. Find out if:
- The respective person has the right to work
- Whether they’re entitled to receive home office equipment
- You will have to provide any kind of training during the onboarding process
The agreements and contracts you sign as a part of onboarding should also account for national or regional regulatory specifics. A well-crafted employment contract should have stipulations on job responsibilities, performance expectations, communication protocols, confidentiality clauses, data protection, dispute resolution, and performance reviews.
The next step would be to train remote workers on anything that may lead to compliance issues. Data privacy and security training is non-negotiable. Authentication and access control training can also reduce the risk of violations or security threats stemming from the remote work environment.
The Importance of a Foolproof Remote Work Policy
A remote work policy is a document that outlines expectations and guidelines for all employees to follow. It’s a comprehensive how-to guide that focuses on procedures, safety protocols, workplace specifics, and technologies employed to do one’s job while following a regulatory framework.
As hybrid work is becoming the norm, standard workplace policies have to account for the new reality and the way it’s changing professional interactions.
Well-crafted remote work policies should contain:
- Rules on eligibility for remote work
- Guidelines on mandatory work hours, equipment, and tools made available to each employee
- Provisions on designing and equipping a remote workplace
- Cybersecurity stipulations and protocols
- Guidelines on communication between coworkers
- Guidelines on employee well-being
Good workflow management is also dependent on effective performance tracking, building trust and transparency through daily communication, having clearly defined roles within teams, and offering the right incentives (like career growth opportunities).
Maximizing Cybersecurity in Remote Environments
Cybersecurity is crucial for all organizations, especially those operating in highly regulated sectors.
Remote work has created numerous challenges that concern executives and make IT security managers sweat. In 2023, 72 percent of respondents in a survey responded they are very concerned or at least somewhat concerned about the online risks related to employees working from home. The number of respondents not at all concerned was only 6 percent.
Without concrete policies and being a part of a shared on-site work environment, common cyber threats like ransomware are more likely to evade defense mechanisms, group head of cyber governance at FWD Insurance in Singapore Pritish Purohit told Forbes.
Overcoming these new challenges depends on:
- Educating employees on recognizing cybersecurity threats
- Strengthening the corporate network through good password policies, multi-factor authentication, the selection of the right antivirus applications, frequent updates, and backups
- Securing remote connections by leveraging VPNs and setting device usage boundaries
- Implementing company-wide cybersecurity policies that apply to both in-office and remote workers
- Carrying out regular security assessments and vulnerability audits
- Adhering to data protection laws like HDPR and HIPAA
- Using an extra layer of protection to safeguard the most sensitive information (for example, only having certain individuals accessing such files and maintaining detailed access logs)
A Focus on Employee Well-being Is Crucial
Finally, don’t forget to maintain the focus on employee well-being, regardless of the workplace model your organization has embraced.
To improve the mental and physical well-being of employees, consider the following:
- Maintain regular communication, preferably using video conferencing tools to make everyone feel connected
- If possible, schedule in-person meetings at least a few times per month
- Discourage overwork and promote better work-life balance (by selecting the right compensation models that will keep workers from spending too much time as the lines between personal and professional get blurred)
- Offer personalized health benefits (89 percent of remote workers value having some kind of health benefit as a part of their employment package)
- Make sure everyone is aware of the available paid time off within the organization
- Provide mental health and well-being resources
- Allow work-hour flexibility
Working from home creates legal considerations that some organizations aren’t prepared to face, while others have been attempting to address those ineffectively.
To reduce the risk of compliance issues, come up with a robust remote work policy. Ensure employees are properly trained and stick to those rules to reduce risks. All other challenges can be addressed via regular performance reviews and audits. Identifying challenges and threats quickly is essential to determine viable remedies and implement those before the issue turns into a major compliance problem. 
Giovanni Gallo is the Co-CEO of Ethico, where his team strives to make the world a better workplace with ethics hotline services, sanction screening and license monitoring, and workforce eLearning software and services.