Organizational agility is a universal business imperative
To thrive in today’s world, businesses must be more adept than ever at navigating fluid and unpredictable operating environments. This largely comes down to the ability to know when to pivot (operationally, strategically, or technologically), having good insight into the best options for pivoting, choosing the best path, and then executing well. Whether we’re talking about oft-cited examples like Amazon, an extremely diverse company that started out as a bookseller, or Kodak, a former market leader that was quite late in transitioning to digital technology, organizational agility is a key determinant of business success. In fact, it’s become a universal business imperative.
To underscore this point even further, I’ll share this finding from Accenture: “Truly agile firms are more than twice as likely as the average organization to achieve top-quartile financial performance (55% versus 25%).“ While this research was published in 2018 based on thousands of interviews with business executives the prior year, it would be hard to imagine that operating environments were more unpredictable then vs. what we’re experiencing today.
Ability to stay ahead of workplace compliance is essential for organizational agility
One area where this unpredictability is especially acute is the ever-changing landscape of HR and workforce-related compliance requirements. To remain agile, the ability to stay ahead of these frequently shifting compliance obligations has become essential. Given this key dependency underlying the ability of organizations to execute well on pivots, HR and workforce-related compliance has arguably become just as much of a business imperative for U.S. based businesses.
Another way of looking at organizational agility is the ability to consistently be out in front of business risks and opportunities. And without question, one of the major risks that businesses must be concerned about – as already highlighted – is failure to comply with the abundance of regulatory requirements tied to the workforce. Non-compliance in this area can certainly result in fines, legal disputes, escalated liabilities, and even damage to an employer’s brand, therefore ability to hire and attract top talent. Because businesses generally give their attention to the ‘bigger’ or ‘more important’ labor laws, what often poses the bigger challenges are the seemingly inconsequential, perhaps more ground-level regulations. One such example is compliance with posting requirements, which could basically be labeled as, “seems inconsequential, until it no longer is.”
Labor law postings are integral compliance and a symbol of employee advocacy
While there are dozens of potentially relevant HR compliance risks when federal, state and local jurisdictions are considered, typically those related to discriminatory hiring, pay practices, various types of harassment, and large OSHA infractions tend to get most of the media and perhaps courtroom attention. While the financial risks and fines for non-compliance with posting requirements may not seem as steep as some of these others historically on the radar of HR departments, they can definitely add up quickly, especially if you have violations at multiple locations, or face escalated liability due to failure to inform employees of their rights. The latter is basically a key reason for the emergence of workplace posting regulations. Moreover, there is an increasing sentiment to view them as an important symbol that the employer is committed to employee advocacy. We shall return to the superior employee experience theme shortly.
Maintaining compliance avoids operational “speed bumps” – critical for maintaining agility
Before further examining the critical linkage between HR-related compliance and elevating organizational agility–as obviously implied by this blog’s title–let’s shine a quick but bright light on why I believe attention to labor law poster compliance warranted this much — if not even more — attention: The requirements are not always apparent, they change frequently (making it difficult for employers to keep up), and non-compliance poses real risk to businesses.
According to the experts at PosterElite, there have been over 160 changes to workplace poster display requirements across the 50 states in just the last 12 months, and that’s combined with another 40+ changes at the city and county level—the vast majority of them necessitating a concrete action be taken by the employer. Additionally, there are often several posting requirements that are specific to a company’s size and industry which are difficult to find, and most businesses are completely unaware of. And possible repercussions? Fines for improper posting can exceed $40,000 per location. Failure to inform employees of their rights via these labor law notices may result in waived statutes of limitations and escalated financial liability in the event of a legal dispute.
And regarding the aforementioned critical linkage between organizational agility and workplace compliance: If a business seeks to be in that top quartile of financial performance I alluded to earlier, they must excel in avoiding operational speed bumps while not allowing compliance administration to become a distraction.
Don’t let compliance admin be a drag on agility. Leverage HCM services to simplify.
Bringing this back to poster compliance … While downloading and printing compliance posters from federal, state, or city governments can be “free”, having HR search for the applicable posters, download and distribute them appropriately to work locations and remote employees, and monitor for changes is a costly and unnecessary distraction. Worse, a “do-it-your-self” approach is likely to miss something, leaving the business exposed. To avoid non-compliance related “speed bumps” and to better allocate valuable HR time to more strategic areas, I advocate for obtaining integrated compliance services such as those offered by PosterElite, directly from already-trusted HCM providers.
Beyond the opportunity cost of allocating resources to this, and the various costs of trying to manage this whole process effectively in-house, I’ll cite this concerning stat from HCM solution vendor UKG’s ’Mega Trends report’ published in 2025: 42% of global employees say their employer isn’t meeting their needs–a finding that can logically be attributed to a myriad of factors such as feeling undervalued, or under-invested in from a career growth standpoint. Perhaps a visible commitment to areas of workplace compliance featured in this blog represents a great opportunity for organizations to demonstrate true advocacy for their workforce.
My 5-pillar framework to support a superior employee experience
Finally, with respect to the above stat in bold, my own article published in HR Executive back in 2017 offered-up a 5-pillar framework intended to guide organizations in delivering a “superior employee experience or ‘EX’ and serve to preempt that unfortunate research finding. It was depicted as follows and there’s little, if anything, I would personally change in these fairly universal EX elements today.
Calling special attention to the fourth one below!
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