If you work with freelancers, or contract auditors to conduct social compliance audits or inspections for your clients, you may want to ask yourself these questions:
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Data protection: Do they use secure domains, firewalls, data clouds, and secure laptops to carry out reasonable data protection? Or do you just give them your email ID to access your emails and other sensitive information? or are they still using free domains and insecure data connections?
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Document management: Do you have a system to maintain hard copies for more than two (2) years to five (5) years, as required by some standards and regulations? Or do you just let auditors or inspectors bring the documents to their homes or dispose of them improperly?
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Compliance support: Do you have internal compliance staff to handle your compliance visit to the factory or investigate any anomalies? Or do you rely on the auditors to report any issues without verification?
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Communication and coordination: Do you contact them several times to confirm their schedule, availability, and progress? Or still, you could not find a central point of contact to handle their schedules and communicate with them effectively?
These questions are important because they can affect the quality, reliability, and credibility of your social compliance audits. Social compliance audits are inspections of external production houses, factories, farms, or packaging facilities to verify whether they comply with social and ethical responsibilities, health and safety regulations, and labor laws. They are often performed by independent auditors that follow a set of international standards, such as SA 8000, SMETA, WRAP, BSCI, ILO, ETI, RBA, ICS, or Higg FEM and many more.
If you want to ensure social compliance with your freelancers or contract auditors, you need to:
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Provide them with adequate resources to carry out these tasks securely, and safely according to regulations, and best practices of social compliance auditing.
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Monitor and evaluate their performance regularly, and provide them with constructive feedback and improvement suggestions.
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Establish and enforce clear policies and procedures for data protection, document management, compliance support, communication and coordination, and other aspects of social compliance auditing.
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Recognise and reward their contributions and achievements, and foster a culture of trust and collaboration.
By doing so, you can improve the quality and efficiency of your social compliance audits, enhance your reputation and credibility in the market, and increase your customer satisfaction and loyalty.
You may wonder why you should choose Greenleaf Assurance's freelance auditors over other options. The reason is that we have solved an industry problem, and we are the first to offer such a solution.
If you want to learn more about how we can help you ensure social compliance with your freelancers or contract auditors, please visit our website at greenleafassurance.com or send us an email at info@greenleafassurance.com. We would love to hear from you and offer you a free consultation.