Introducing PeopleDoc HR Compliance Assist

PeopleDoc recently announced a new online service to help global HR teams manage compliance in the digital world. HR compliance Assist is the brainchild of Chief Legal and Compliance Officer Arnaud Gouachon. We caught up with Arnaud to find out what drove him to create this initiative.

1. Let's cut to the chase: Why do HR teams need this? Doesn't this information already exist? 

We've found our customers want clarity much faster. The information HR needs hasn't existed in one place in a way that is easy to access and understand.  It can be complicated today to chase down the information you need about a certain regulation in a certain jurisdiction. That means wasted time and effort. You may not be able to roll out a new service like e-signature for employment agreements because you aren't sure it's compliant with electronic signature requirements in that country. That costs you and your company time and money and makes you less competitive. From what we've seen, we are the first HR company to offer self-service information across digital HR compliance and employee data privacy topics for multiple countries.

2. What topics and countries does PeopleDoc HR Compliance Assist cover?

When the service goes live in Q2 it will include a library of articles, white papers and webinars on three topics: HR record retention, digital HR documents and employee data privacy. An example is the new  EU regulation on data privacy (also called GDPR) which has been bringing up a lot of questions from customers. We are working with a network of local lawyers with expertise on each specific topic to provide accurate and current information for nine countries across three continents and we will be adding more countries based on customer demand.

3. Isn't it risky for PeopleDoc to provide legal information?

PeopleDoc HR Compliance Assist is not intended to be a source for legal advice, and thus PeopleDoc customers should not rely on any information provided, distributed or published as part of the services as such. We are clear that this service doesn't replace your own legal counsel. We think making HR compliance and employee data privacy regulation information easily accessible to multiple people in your company will enable faster and better collaboration between HR IT and legal teams. Ultimately, any decision regarding compliance, legal and risk management issues are up to the company's business leaders.

4. Any additional ideas this project has sparked?

Right now, we are focused on delivering this new service because we've heard the demand. Because it is a digital service, there are lots of possibilities for mining the usage data to evolve the service and to provide insights in context in our products. As always, we'll collaborate with our customers to uncover what's next.