How to Build a Bulletproof HR Compliance Strategy

Alaina Hirschi

Hello, everybody. We are live from BambooHR.

Thank you so much for joining us today in our webinar on How to Build a Bulletproof Compliance Strategy. Thank you to everybody for your patience.

We had a little bit of a hiccup last week when we tried to run this. So appreciate you guys taking the time to join and we've got some great stuff to share with you.

So we're really excited. I know compliance is everybody's favorite topic and we're here to hopefully help you guys lighten the load as HR professionals.

So, you're managing everything from policies to training, so we definitely want to do what we can to help out. So, let's go ahead and dive in.

And you know what? I'd love it if everybody in the chat could just share where you're joining from today. That's always fun to see.

And I will go ahead and get started here. Awesome.

Okay. Let's jump into some housekeeping items.

Just so you guys know, this lab, well, webinar is going to be recorded, and you will be able to get recording afterwards. If there's anything that we go through that you're like, wait.

I wanted to go back and rewatch that, you'll get a recording after the fact, and you'll be able to review this. And then we will be doing some Q and A.

There's a Q and A widget. So if you have a question that you'd like us to address, go ahead and drop that in, and then we will get to that at some point.

Let's do some brief introductions. We have a couple of hosts with us today.

Awesome. Okay.

So first of all, I'd love to introduce Camila Castiblanco. She is on our team here at BambooHR.

She's a product marketing manager. And for the past seven years, she has been learning and growing in all things marketing.

She's super passionate about helping teams cut through inefficiencies and getting their best work done with tools and technology that really fit their needs. Outside of that, and outside of work, Camila likes to spend time with her family.

She likes tackling DIY projects and planning her next trip. Next up, we have Jocelyn King, who is SHRM-SCP, and she is actually the CEO and founder of VirgilHR.

We're super lucky to have her with us today. Really excited to hear from her.

But for those of you who are not maybe familiar, VirgilHR is a SaaS platform that helps HR teams make real time, compliant decisions. Jocelyn is a seasoned HR leader with experience across high-growth tech companies from start ups to public organizations.

Her background includes leading people functions, shaping HR strategy, and building strong, scalable cultures at companies like Ocado Group and Cybrary. And then finally, we have Katy Huston, who is also a team member here at BambooHR.

She's currently the senior manager of HR consulting services here, and she leads a team dedicated to helping organizations navigate complex people challenges, with as much clarity and confidence as possible. She has nearly 20 years of HR experience across Fortune 500 companies and SMBs, and she has guided lots of organizations through compliance, benefits, and lead management.

She is great. She's approachable.

She's got a great sense of humor, and she's really good at making really complex HR topics feel simple and engaging. So, those are our speakers today.

So looking forward to hearing from them, and, we're going to go ahead and dive in. I will bring Camila to the stage, and we will get started.

Thanks, Camila.

Camila Castiblanco

Right. Thanks, Alaina.

I am ready to kick off our session today and talk about compliance, in the invisible backbone of HR, really. It's the thing that when it's done right, no one really notices.

But when it goes wrong, everyone notices. And when that happens, it's not just HR that feels it, the whole company feels it.

And the tricky part is that compliance isn't just one thing. It's 100 things happening all at the same time.

There's federal, state, and local laws changing constantly, and then we have policies and handbooks aging faster that we can update them. And then there's training requirements that shift depending on someone's role, location, or industry.

And then you have critical processes like I-9s and E-verify, where even one mistake can put the entire organization at risk. So for HR teams, it can honestly feel like you're always playing defense, trying to keep up, stay ahead, and protect your people and your company from every possible angle of compliance.

And that's exactly why BambooHR built a smarter, more connected approach to compliance, one that brings clarity and control to every part of your compliance work. Through intelligence, training, onboarding automation, and personalized guidance, BambooHR helps simplify all of that complexity, reduce the risk, and help keep you ahead of those constant changes.

So now that we've looked at the big picture of compliance, let's take a closer look at each of the different compliance areas and how they each bring value to you. To start, let's zoom in on compliance training, because compliance training isn't really a one size fits all.

And we're very, very excited to have partnered with EasyLlama on this piece, compliance training. As we go deeper here, as we all know, compliance depends on, specifically, training on your industry, your role, and where your people are located.

But the problem is that most of that training hasn't kept up.

A lot of it is outdated. It is boring and, honestly, pretty forgettable, and employees rush through it.

And HR teams are really left sending reminders, chasing completions, and hoping that the training actually sticks when it matters and to protect your organization when it matters. So that's why we wanted to make compliance training better, a built in experience, something that's accessible and actually effective for your teams.

And so here's what we partnered with EasyLama, a leader in modern engaging compliance training and brought all that high-quality content and courses directly into BambooHR. So everything is built right in.

There's no extra logins. There's no learning a new tool.

There's no bouncing between systems, which is really, really exciting, and it's going to save you a lot of time. And then the training is accessible and inclusive.

It is available in English and Spanish audio, and it is also available in 11 languages for subtitles so that everyone can understand it clearly and learn these topics in the language that they're most comfortable with. And then it's also engaging content that is compliant.

There's a lot of interactive modules if you're familiar with the EasyLlama content. It includes a lot of real life scenarios, lots of videos and quizzes that actually help people learn instead of just checking a box.

So now instead of managing compliance training across multiple platforms, you can assign it, track it, and complete it all in BambooHR right where your people already work. And the best part is that compliance training is included in all BambooHR plans.

The specific courses that you get depend on your plan. So our core customers get one foundational course, and that is Harassment Prevention, which gives every organization a solid starting point.

And then for our Pro customers, they get 15 curated, must-have courses that cover compliance essentials and key workplace skill development. And then our Elite customers, they get full access to EasyLlama's entire training library.

There's over 300 I believe, actually, over 400 plus courses in that library. Everything they offer, including full collections on compliance, diversity and inclusion, mental wellness, safety, soft skills, and more is fully included for our lead customers.

So huge value added for our packages, and we're very, very excited to be sharing this with you. And because compliance looks different depending on where your people work, we have also created separate course views for international customers so that the experience always stays relevant.

And what that means is we added four additional courses in Pro, specifically for international value. We have courses like HIPAA or OSHA that are use-specific.

So those are being replaced for GDPR or artificial intelligence or accessibility for interior enforced labor, so that there's, again, a balanced value for not just our US customers but also our international customers. So, again, huge, huge value added.

But let's go ahead and jump in and take a look at the demo. So let me go ahead and share my screen here.

Not going to lie, I was a little bit nervous. This is exactly where we started having technical difficulties last time.

So really excited this is working. We are right now in our BambooHR homepage.

And to get started with training, we're going to go ahead to the top right corner and head over to our settings area. And there under settings, you're going to look for the training tab.

And then you're going to go ahead and click on add new training, and then we're going to have two different options available for you. The first one is to create your own custom training tasks.

So let's say your company has a specific policy or a specific training, that you need to make sure your employees are, you know, informed or that they need to complete. So let's say in our company, there needs to be a safety orientation that employees need to complete to cover emergency and evacuation in our building.

If I have a link to an existing video, I can just drop that in here, and I would just also be able to select a category. So let's say this one fits into New Hire Training.

I can also customize by frequency. If I need this course to be coming in a renewal basis, I can do that by years or months.

In this case, this is more of a one time training, but I can also go ahead and add company files if needed. And then the next step is to assign that training.

So I can either assign that to all employees or I can add or assign the training to a certain group of employees using the different filters. So that can be either by department, division, employee status, job title, location, teams.

So lots of different options for you to assign the training, and then you would just go ahead and save that. And then on the employee side.

Let's actually go back. So that covers actually option number one.

Option number two is training, selecting training from the pre-existing content from the EasyLlama library. So if you go ahead and select that, your first step is to go ahead and choose a training from the library.

So right now, in here, we are in an Elite account, and that's why there are 391 courses available. So a lot of great content that you can filter by topic, like active listening.

There's tons and tons of different topics in here. You can also filter that by industry, and then you could also filter that by region.

If you click on the training, you're able to see details. You can also preview content, learn the exact duration of the training, a brief course description, what employees will learn in the course, and then, language availability for audio subtitles in on-screen text.

So for this example, let's say I'm going to select a smart training, what this actually means is this is a pretty cool feature where the system automatically assigns the right version of the course depending on the employee's role, location, and industry. So in a way, it does all the work for you.

So we'll just go ahead and select the training. And pretty similar to what we just did with the custom training task, is what you will see in step two.

So I would just select a category here, the frequency. Typically, harassment prevention, we do want that in a renewal basis of at least one year and then assign the training to all employees or whatnot.

And you would go ahead and save that, and the training will be assigned to all employees. And then on the employee side, let's jump really quick to the employee tab here.

For the employee, whenever they go to their employee records, they're going to see a list of all the upcoming training.

For me, since I assigned the smart version of the course, what was assigned to me is the Canada or California non-supervised and construction version of that training. And then, what's really cool on the employee side too is that they can pause or resume the course to feed their schedule.

If they are currently in progress and they log out or they need to jump into a meeting or do something else, the progress will be saved. And then as you jump into the actual course the experience is really seamless.

You can see all of that interactive content that comes from EasyLlama, obviously, with a BambooHR tweak, but that's the employee experience. And then if you ever need to report or show completion on compliance training, you can do that in the custom report section.

You would just need to create a new report. Let's say we are planning to report on Q4 training completion.

So you would just go ahead and select, training in here, training name, and then you can select your different filters. Let's go ahead and select training, due date, expiration date.

You can add fields like departments in here to filter further. And so you would get a complete report of who has completed that, their due date, the expiration date, the department, and then you can either download or print that report.

So that wraps up our compliance training, demo. I hope you're as excited as I am about this new compliance training experience, and I will now pass it over to Jocelyn to share more about compliance intelligence, which we're getting through VirgilHR.

Jocelyn King

Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

So my name is Jocelyn King. I'm the CEO of Virgil HR, and I've been an HR practitioner my entire career.

One of the challenge areas that I had was tracking and complying with employment and labor laws, particularly at the state and local level. So, built VirgilHR to really automate a lot of the compliance processes for HR professionals and eliminate the need to do research or reduce the amount of time you have to talk to lawyers.

There are a lot of really great benefits to it, so I'm really excited to show it to you today. Let's see here.

I'm just going to share the screen here. Kind of some quick items before I go into the demo.

VirgilHR is available for all plans for free. So what the team is going to do is, when they send the email with the recording, they're also going to include a link for you to go in and sign up.

You'll want to sign up, creating your own account with VirgilHR, not with BambooHR. So it'll be a brand new account.

You'll hit sign up for that, and then you'll get access to it right away. So, a really quick poll that we wanted to do was whether or not you are aware of VirgilHR as a free resource to you and whether you're actually using it today, or if it's something that's not available to you yet and you'd like to get more information on.

There we go. Thank you very much.

So have you already signed up for VirgilHR? That's what we'd love to learn about. We're getting some votes in, which is awesome.

I feel like we should have Jeopardy music playing right now.

Alaina

We totally should, Jocelyn.

Jocelyn

That's for next time.

Okay. Well, thank you guys so much for submitting the polls.

Anybody else wants to do it, right now is the time, but it gives us a really good idea of who's on, how we can support you, and any additional communications you need. So, if it's okay, we'll go ahead and end the poll now.

There you go. And we'll move on to this.

So, with virtual HR, you can get instant compliance answers using our chatbot. We have a lot of other tools that I'll go through in a moment.

You can also create and maintain your handbooks. Not only can you create handbooks, but you can also upload existing handbooks, and work on those handbooks directly within our software.

You can compare laws across states, but also localities as well. We cover over 22,000 localities.

Stay ahead of legal deadlines, which I'll show you more about in just a minute. We have tons of resources.

And by resources, I mean, over 700 policy templates, forms, legal agreements like NDAs, severance agreements, employment agreements by state, checklists, how-to guides. We even have compliance guides as well, which kind of walks you through absolutely anything that you would need to know when you are setting up in a new state for the first time or you're supporting an employee in a certain state.

And then, you know, when you're kind of going through all of our features within the product, really understanding that every piece of content that's been built out within our product has been built out by one of our labor and employment attorneys. So it's all really solid data.

So, to get started, I mentioned you will want a separate VirgilHR account. You will get that link in an email, and that will give you kind of all the information you need to go ahead and set up that account.

It is a BambooHR branded portal, and what you'll want to do is have one admin creating that account because that admin is going to invite the rest of your HR team members into it. So just have that one person.

Otherwise, we kind of have to go in and consolidate everything for you. So one person, and then they can go ahead and add other users.

And, note that it's kind of unlimited users and roles, but I always recommend kinda keeping it a little tight just to your HR team. So I'm going to go ahead and jump into the demo now.

There we go. I'm still new to Goldcast.

Alright. Now we have over 10 different feature sets in here, but I want to show you three of the main ones that are particularly interesting.

So the first is our legal updates. As laws pass, become effective, you're getting emails from SHRM or maybe from a law firm.

I had an Excel sheet where I was tracking everything. It was not scalable at all.

So we provide that information to you in a couple different ways. The first is here on our homepage.

You go to our notification section and pretty much almost on a daily basis as these laws are changing, we are providing these notices to you. They can be very specific like this first one here, New Jersey wage laws for minor league baseball players under a collective bargaining agreement.

So specific. We also, as I mentioned, go down to localities.

So for example, there's a new training requirement for hotel workers in the city of LA. Just to give you an idea of what it looks like, let's look at this.

Columbus, Ohio adopts a salary transparency law. What our attorneys do is they summarize that piece of legislation in a way that's just really easy to read and kind of explain who are the employers that are being impacted, the employees being impacted, requirements an employer has to meet, qualifications an employee has to have.

We always tie back to the original legislation as well, and we include the effective date. This is a bit rare.

It passed November 11. It goes into effect December 3.

Usually, it'll pass, you know, June and then go into effect in January. When that happens, it's impossible remembering that law is going into effect six or seven months later.

So we also have this compliance calendar. Here you can search by any time frame.

You can search by state or states. You can customize your profile so you're only getting information about certain states, and you can search by keyword.

Here's that Columbus, Ohio salary transparency law. So you can see the full summary here.

You can add this to your calendar so that it's visible and top of mind, and you can create a task as well. You know what? You probably want to notify your recruiting team.

Set a due date, assign it to yourself or somebody else on the team, and then that full summary is going to be there. Really quickly, just because it kind of ties to these legal updates with the task list, when you create a task, you'll find it here in your task list or in the task tab.

In addition to the tasks you're creating, we're also creating tasks for you. So as an example, Missouri.

Right? You have to provide notice to employees who are on paid sick leave. This is an older alert, but just to give you an idea of how it works.

We say, hey. You know, because this law was passed, you had to provide written notice to the earned paid sick time policy.

By this date, it needs to be on a specific size paper with a specific size font, and it has to include this information. We make it really easy for you.

We're going to provide a notice template to you for you to use. And because of this law, you also have to provide or post a poster in the workplace, so we make a digital copy of that available for you here as well.

You can go ahead and reassign it and you can also go in here and manage the status of your tasks as well. The second thing that I wanted to show you is our chatbot.

When I was thinking about the company and what I wanted the chatbot to do, I wanted to do a couple of things. Eliminate the need for you to have to do any research, but also, analyze what laws are applicable to specific employees you're doing work for.

So we cover really the full life cycle of the employee from a classification audit tool to determine whether a rule should be exempt or nonexempt, all the way to unemployment. I'm going to give a very simple example, but these can get quite complicated like parental leave in California, for example.

I'm going to go ahead and give a termination, example. So let's say that you were terminating somebody in California.

His name is John Doe, and we're going to choose California as that state that he's in. What the chatbot is going to start doing is ask diagnostic questions, and this is what helps it determine what laws apply to John Doe.

So is this a voluntary or involuntary termination? We'll say involuntary, and it's going to start doing a few things here. I'll let it talk for a minute and then go back up.

So the first thing it's going to do is it's going to provide some important information about retaliatory laws you should be aware of. In California, there's a presumption of retaliation law, not just at the state level, but at local levels as well that you need to be aware of.

And there are still some COVID-19 retaliation laws as well.

We'll also give you additional information about final wages. What goes into final wages.

So we will explain kind of, hey. In this state, this is what goes in the final wages.

This is what you have to pay. When it needs to be paid out, which in this case, because it's an involuntary termination, is immediately at the time of termination.

And then separation documents. What documents do you need to provide to that individual to be compliant with any applicable laws? And if there are government forms, we will provide those for you as a digital copy as well.

We also will do a few other things. So some special considerations when it comes to protected class under the ADA.

And also, we provide separation agreement templates as well or severance agreement templates for ages 40 and above or under 40 since, you know, the language does change a little bit and it is very specific to the state because of the restrictive covenants they have. So if you clicked here, it would give you access to all of those templates as well.

The last thing I want to show you is our handbook builder. Our handbook builder is very simple and easy to use.

Let's say this is ABC Company and we are creating a general handbook. You can create three types of handbooks.

One that is federal only, one that's federal plus state or states, or one that is state or a series of states. So go ahead and choose the states that your employees are in.

And, it's going to ask for some information and this helps it figure out what policies actually need to be in here? Does FMLA apply? Are there some specific, state laws, for example, that say, hey. Employers with five employees or over in this specific state have to do x, y, and z.

We want to capture all of that. We also have tokens here so you're not writing the name of your company over and over again or who employees should be contacting in the event that they have a question about a policy.

You can do two things here, and I mentioned this earlier. You can either create from scratch or you can upload an existing handbook.

When you upload your existing handbook, it will actually tell you what policies are missing based on the size of your organization and work locations and provide recommended policy templates for you to incorporate into your handbooks so you're compliant. But I'll show you what it looks like when you're creating from scratch.

It's very simple. So what might I mean, like, sometimes I've had handbooks take months to do.

So this is a really great tool because you can do it a whole lot faster this way. But here's your welcome message.

You can easily go in and edit anything in here including policies using our toolbar here and you can see where the tokens populate like the name of the company, for example. But we've also done is we've created the handbook builder in a variety of headings, right, or topic areas.

Because we have so many policy templates, we want to make sure that we're making it as easy as possible for you. So I always recommend searching for policies based on the heading name first.

By that, I mean, let's say that you wanted to work on the EEO section. You go here to policy topics, choose EEO, and these are all the policies that are going to be relevant to that area.

You'll see some are mandatory, and that's because there's a law associated to it, like in this case, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. So you'll kinda see the policy in here to make sure you're happy with it.

Then there's some that are optional like, a harassment and compliant procedure or best practice, but it is technically optional. I'm going to go ahead and move all of this over.

It's going to move into the EEO section, and I've got them here. And this is where I can come in and edit the policies as I see fit.

You can also upload or create your own policies in this tool as well. But once you've finished with the general section, you'll go to the state section next because they're state specific policies.

They're all pretty much going to be mandatory. So we'll go ahead and move them over, add them in here.

Looks good, and we'll go ahead and preview the handbook now. We'll get that table of contents here.

You can see all the EEO policies that I included in addition to Alabama and Alaska. So we can go here and go to the Alaska section, for example.

And then once I've hit complete, a few things happen. The first is you can go in here and actually, format your handbook so that you are choosing the colors, the fonts, you can add graphics in there, your logo, all that good stuff.

But you can also share your handbook with other members of your team in here, and they can come in here and collaborate, mention you, mention someone else on the team and say, hey. You know, I really think we should change x, y, and z in this policy.

You can work collaboratively together. You can also send out the handbook via e-signature.

And the last thing is, as these laws are changing, we will create new or updated policy templates. And if they're relevant to your organization, we're going to auto push them into your handbook.

So you'll get an alert. You'll see this red dot in here as well.

But if we look, okay, I have an old handbook in here that has an update required. I'll go ahead and take a look at what that is.

I'm going to preview. Here's an emergency responder leave because this is a much older one that I had in here.

It's actually this law specifically has been retroactively canceled. So, in this case, it's saying, hey.

This no longer applies. But if we were to look at something like the parental leave law in Maryland, what you'll do is you'll see the current version and the updated version so that you can see kind of what the differences are before you go in and update.

Now you always have that real time up to date handbook. So, tons of other features in here, multi-state comparison tool, resources, that I mentioned earlier with policy templates and forms, etc.

We have a legal library in here, compliance audit tool, tons of calculators, ACA calculators, cost to hire calculators, attrition, etc. And, we also have an AI job description builder.

So please, if you are not signed up yet, go ahead and wait for that email to come out with the link and sign up. If you are signed up for it and you are not using it, please go in and use it.

I'm really, really excited as an HR professional to have built something that other HR professionals can use and get value out of. So we're always interested too in feedback.

Alaina

Amazing. Thank you so much, Jocelyn.

Jocelyn

Thank you.

Alaina

That was great information. So practical too.

Cool. Thanks for joining us.

Alright. And we're going to welcome back Camila, and she's going to do another little demonstration for us.

Camila

Alright. Happy to be back.

Let me pull up here really quickly our next topic. So, another really important part of compliance is making sure that every new hire is verified correctly and on time, And that's where I-9 and E-Verify automation comes in.

And this service is powered by Mitratech. It is an add-on.

And when we get into the demo, I'll talk a bit more about pricing. And now while you can manage I-9s manually, it is one of those processes where doing it by hand leaves a lot of room for errors.

There are deadlines, lots of documents to check, and a bunch of small details. And even one mistake can lead to fines and a lot of unnecessary stress for you and your organization.

So we wanted to make these easier and more reliable, and that's why we now offer I-9 and E-Verify automation right inside BambooHR. It makes sure every I-9 is completed accurately and verified to the proper compliance standards without all the back-and-forth of manual tracking.

It handles the deadlines. It keeps everything audit ready and fits directly into your onboarding workflows so that the process stays smoother for both you and your new hires.

So, really, why take the risk when you can automate the whole thing inside the system that you already use? So I'm very excited to show you just how simple we've made this in BambooHR. So let's jump into our I-9 demo here.

Looks like we're in. So, again, we're back in our BambooHR homepage.

And to get started with I-nine and E-Verify, the first thing is for us to install the Mitratech app. So we're going to head over to our settings area in the top right corner, and then we're going to look for the apps section under settings.

And then under the not installed section, we're going to look for the Mitratech app. So if we scroll, Mitratech is down right here.

We're going to go ahead and click install, and then you're going to be presented with two different steps. The first one is for you to learn about pricing.

There is a $3 charge per I-9, and then there is also an option for you to add E-Verify if you're interested. And if you are, there is a cost of $250.

This is a one time charge per company. So, again, this is for you to learn more about the pricing and what you will be getting.

And then our next step here is, guiding you on the four main steps that you need to complete to fully consider installation complete. The first one is what we're doing right now, installing the Mitratech app.

The second one is for you to complete that E-Verify questionnaire if you are interested in acquiring the service. And then the third one is to check for your email.

That is where you're going to receive your partner credentials to get into the Mitratech platform. And then step number four is for you to configure I-9 managers.

These are people in your team that you want to authorize to process I-9s and also E-Verify. So we're going to go ahead and install the Mitratech app, and it's just going to give you a success message that the installation was complete.

So you're going to head over to your email, and you're going to receive three different emails. The first one is going to come from BambooHR, and it is to complete or set up that E-Verify process.

So if you're planning on using E-Verify, you're just going to go ahead and click here and fill out the questionnaire and provide all the required information, and then BambooHR and Mitratech will take it from there. And then the second email, you're actually going to receive two emails directly from track I-9.

The first one is a secure link for you to log in to their home page and get started with I nine and E-Verify, and it's also going to include your username. The second email is going to provide your temporary password.

Once you're logged in and all set up, you can always change that password and go from there. So our next step would be to add I-9 managers.

So I would just go to the people tab. Charlotte, she's my HR manager, so I want to make sure that she has access to process I nines and E-Verify.

So I'm going to go to her employee profile. And then in the top right corner in this three dotted button, I'm going to click there, and then I'm going to look for the employment verification section.

And then I'm going to click on the I-9 manager access. So it's going to give me two different options here.

The first one is to give her access to complete I-9s and also to submit them through the federal E-Verify system. And then the second option is to give her only I-9 access without E-Verify access.

So you're going to go ahead and select either one of them, and then Charlotte is going to get an email with her username and password just like you did to go ahead and set up her profile and get started in the Mitratech platform. So that's it for setting up I-9 managers.

Now to send an I-9, you can do that in two different ways. So let's say I am hiring for this Marketing Manager position, and I'm going to hire Mark Garcia for that position.

So I would just go to his candidate profile and mark him as hired. So Mark got the job.

And as I'm adding him as a new employee, along with sending his new hire packet, now I can also enable the employment eligibility verification for Mark. So along with him setting up his direct deposit and providing his get to know you information question, he will now complete all the I-9 and E-Verify tasks directly, set with his new hire package.

So, really exciting. And then on the admin side, I would just need to select the verification type.

We do support in person, hybrid, or fully remote. So I just need to select that and then send it along with the new hire packet.

The only other option where you can send over in I-9 is directly from the employee profile. So let's say, the person or the hire has already been added as an employee, you are going to be prompted here, like, heads up.

You haven't set up employment eligibility verification for Charlotte. So I'm just going to click on get started.

And, again, I just need to select the verification type, if that's going to happen in person, if that's going to happen hybrid, or fully remote. Now on the employee side, or the new hire side of things, this is what they will receive.

They'll receive an email, you know, letting them know that they are being requested to complete section one of the form I-9. It lists the employer name, the work site, the expected start date, and it also provides a secure link where the, new hire can go in and follow the instructions and fill out the I-9 electronically, get that signed, and also upload all the documentation from lease A, B, or C and for you to get all that documentation and complete section number two.

So once the employee or the new hire has completed the I-9 section one, you will see an update in here. This whole new section is going to pop up once you send out an I-9 verification, and it's going to also give you a status if it's pending, if it's completed, and if it's ready for you to go ahead and complete section two of the I-9 process.

So let's say this was marked as completed. You can just click here to manage your verification, and that's again going to prompt you to log in to Mitratech to complete step number two of the I-9 process.

So that completes our demo for I-9 and E-Verify workflows in BambooHR. And I will now pass it over to Katy Huston to learn about our BambooHR services.

Alaina:

Thanks, Camila.

Katy Huston

Hello, everyone. It's so great to be here with all of you today and be the voice of the HR professional and help with navigating some of the questions you might be asking yourselves of, “Well, goodness. How do I navigate complying with all these requirements that we just talked about?”

So I'm here to talk a little bit about the HR consulting services team at BambooHR, how we can help you on navigating some of these compliance questions, but also just some nuggets that are going to help kind of from an HR professional standpoint. So we'll talk first about we saw some really cool things on how you can use technology to drive compliance in your organization.

But how do you get buy in in the first place so that your organization, senior leadership, your managers, your employees see compliance as something that they need to do, something that they should do, something that's a part of your core company culture versus just one email they got from an HR person that told them they need to do some new policy or something like that. So building compliance into your business outcomes and your strategy for your HR strategy, but also your company strategy? How do you show that having compliant practices actually drives revenue for your organization? Or maybe said differently, not having compliant HR practices, is costing your organization, in profitability, in revenue, in brand, as well.

So thinking about anti-discrimination policies, equitable pay, how you have your total rewards package benefits represented that drives employee retention or drives your hiring practices, shortens your hiring process, gets the right candidates in your organization that stay for a long time, that make the impact in your organization that you want them to. And then providing safe work environments for those employees to stay, thinking about where that's the skill set that you need for your employees maybe is in a new state or outside of the US and you're now entering into global hiring.

What does that look like, and how do we show that doing that compliantly is going to drive business successes? As well as terminations and offboarding, it can be really costly to not terminate an employee correctly in terms of compliance and not adhering to the requirements in certain states like California. You have to have the check in-hand on that last day if you're terminating an employee.

But also just having a respectful experience for employees when they are offboarding that offers them a good experience that leaves them with a good impression of your brand. But also compliant, generating a COBRA timely.

How do we build that into our business outcomes and show that that's going to drive success overall? A big portion of that is how you're communicating your compliance requirements and expectations to your employees. We, as HR professionals, often can expect that if we just craft the perfect email that answers all of the questions that employees are going to think about and says everything in just the right way, that that's going to stick and that's kind of all we need.

And that just isn't consistent with human behavior. We need to tell them and tell them and tell them again in different ways and in different manners that are going to stick with employees, meeting them where they are.

So think about your strategy in terms of the life cycle of your employees, where those compliance metrics are going to be calendar-driven, things that you have to do at the end of the year, for example. This is, you know, benefit notification season where we need to, during open enrollment, make sure our employees have their SBCs.

Are those available digitally? Are we still printing them out and giving them to every employee? And, I hope not. I hope that they're available digitally to everyone when they need to because that's one of those compliant pieces that we need to do.

Do we have marketplace notifications, 401(k) notifications, W-2, WOTC, all of those, the end-of-the-year calendar driven items, or where are those things that they're going to be a little bit more surprises, like, required trainings, harassment in California as an example, planning those things out and really having those policy-driven communications. Thinking about where the timing of those policy changes and trainings is really impactful.

So where do you have mandatory required based trainings that you do need to plan for that should be in person, and they should be, high-touch, you know, forklift certification type training where you really need to make sure that your employees have the right skill set. They're getting specific training.

There's a regulation that drives that. Having those things be mandatory in person, really interactive, that's going to be really important, and then document that with a certification of completion, who was there.

We're going to test employees to make sure that there's a check for understanding, things like that. Where are those important topics, but they're really going to be industry specific.

They're more of a, “Hey. Here's this new thing that we're going to do in the construction industry this year because there's a tweak in a compliance regulation.” Or it's something that's important but not urgent, and it's just going to be time based probably one time.

Having those things be in person or something virtual that signifies the importance but isn't really overdoing it is going to be really important. And addressing one-off culture changes or process changes, having those be in-person followed by a written communication so you're really able to communicate the why behind the training or the compliance trend.

It's not just something that says, well, we're doing this training today because we have to do this, but really communicating the value that the company sees behind compliance, and that's why we're doing this. That's why we're adhering to the requirement and then doing this training.

Also, think about how you're going to address noncompliance. So when you see an employee that does something that violates your company policy or you're seeing a trend or, oof, we're not following the clocking in and out for lunches in California.

We're having a lot of meal period violations. We need to do a reminder to employees, on how important it is to comply with those policies.

Having those things not just be an email that says you're not doing this, but making it more hands-on, a scavenger hunt to go find the policy, read it, answer a question, you get a little prize at the end. Something like that can be much more impactful than “You guys aren't doing this correctly,” and kind of a punitive communication from employees.

Make it fun. Show them that compliance is an expectation of the organization, not just something that we do because we have to when we're checking a box.

So a couple practical ways you guys as HR professionals can go back and actually drive compliant processes in your organization, empower your leaders, your employees to think and act compliantly, provide instant gratification. Where can you provide rewards that are going to immediately be like, yay.

You were compliant here. You did the thing.

You reported the phishing email. You did a great job in this area, or you completed the training for this thing.

That immediate gratification that says, job well done. Here's a gift card.

Here's a pat on the back, ties immediately and gets our serotonin going that, like, I did something compliant, I got a reward, I should keep doing that. That's really important.

Maybe offer an exclusive experience for the people that comply before the deadline. They get a cool lunch experience catered by the company.

Maybe your CEO is a part of a rock band. They get to go to an exclusive concert, or you're going to bring everybody to see the new Wicked movie, go to a sports event.

Something fun that shows, again, there's a reward for being compliant, but it's exclusive, and you really have to do something to be a part of that exclusive group.

Give the gift of time.

This is not exactly free, but a little bit easier to build in maybe. Give the morning off an extra break, early release, flex days.

Now think about where these things might be compliance issues themselves. So flex days aren't compliant in every state.

Make sure that you're still paying employees for the time, and you're just saying, “Like, hey. You did the thing we asked you. You get an extra fifteen minutes.” Something like that. Group competitions.

I mean, who doesn't love a little competition between divisions or departments? Or make it more of a team building activity where you're creating different groups. They're going to compete with each other.

There's somebody from finance. There's somebody from HR.

There's somebody from sales. There's somebody from engineering in every single group.

It's a way you can also drive culture and create a little competition for that. Who can do the compliant thing first?

I love to say money is great, but swag is better.

So where you can spend that money to give employees a little bit of a swag, a little bit of something they can hold tangibly in their hand that says, you were compliant with this thing. You did this thing, and that's important to us.

And it's that daily reminder every time you pick up your coffee mug that says, “Do the right thing,” it's a daily reminder of how important compliance is and how you value that in your organization. So spend that money to give them something tangible that communicates that in the future, not just that one time they did that training.

So water bottles are super in right now. Socks are big.

Mouse pad, a laptop case, something that is that tangible reminder, not just a you know, $25 digital gift card, although those are great too. Use that recognition mechanism to really reward compliance and do that publicly where that's appropriate.

Not everybody likes being called out on a Zoom in front of the CEO and like, “Hey. You know, Katy was a compliant person this month.”

Like, yay. That isn't rewarding to everybody.

So make sure that it is appropriate, that it's something the person's going to value. It's the right moment to do it, but that can be a really great motivator for folks to say, “Hey. You're going to get a minute to get a shout out on the next meeting or at the next CEO event. So make sure you do the thing, and you don't want to be from the group that's not on that slide.”

If you're sitting there thinking, “Okay, this is all fabulous, I don't even know where to start. I don't think I'm totally compliant today. Where do I start to wrap my head around becoming compliant or just identifying my gaps?”

So we've got some steps here. You can take a quick screenshot.

We'll send this out. I won't drag you guys through every single one.

But some practical steps to really think about how do you audit your current compliance and realize where there might be some gaps or where you do need to do some work. The best thing to do if you aren't compliant today is to do your due diligence and show that as soon as you realized it, you took steps to correct those actions.

Document those steps that you take so you can say, “Oh, we didn't know about I-9s until November 20, 2025. But as soon as we did, here's what we did to become compliant and document all of those things.

If all of that sounds incredibly daunting to you and you're like, “Okay. This sounds fabulous, but I need help.”

I need an expert. I need someone who can tell me what to do, help me make the right decisions, make this easy for me. Heck, take some of it off of my plate, please.”

That's where the HR consulting services team at BambooHR can come in.

We've got dedicated HR consultants that'll work directly with you to understand your HR initiatives, your business outcomes, your goals, exactly who you are as an HR professional and what you need to be successful at your organization. How can we help make those decision points easier, but also leverage your technology and your HR tech stack, your BambooHR ecosystem to be able to drive all of those things for you and make your lives easier.

So reach out to our HR consulting team today to help with all of these compliance things that are not easy. We are here to help.

Alaina:

Awesome. Thank you so much, Katy.

I really appreciate that. That's some really great practical information you shared.

I liked your motto. Money is great, swag is better.

Katy

Swag is better.

Alaina

That is so awesome. Alright.

Well, we are going to wrap up with a final poll here. So let's see.

Okay. Let's see if we can kick this off.

There we go. So if you guys want go ahead and take a second to respond to this, which compliance solution are you most likely to explore further after this webinar that helps us get some feedback? We'd love to hear how you guys are feeling about everything.

Well, thank you so much everyone for joining the webinar today. Hopefully, you guys got some helpful information on, you know, what to be doing with compliance and how to build your strategy and where to go from here and some helpful resources.

And, we always have BambooHR services available. If you are like Katy was saying, I need somebody to help me and take this off my plate potentially.

Thank you so much for joining, and this will go out as a recording afterwards. So, again, if there's anything you want revisit, make sure you keep an eye on your inbox, and you will get the recording of this session.

So thanks so much, guys, and have a great day.