Why Connected Workflows Are Becoming the New Baseline for Workforce Compliance
Employers will continue to face various legal requirements from local, state and federal authorities, and even basics like pay statements, job postings, leave and minimum wage can vary widely by location.
That’s the reality behind today’s workforce compliance: the work is bigger, more interconnected, and more sensitive to worker-level detail than most organizations’ operating models were built to handle. And for many teams, the hardest part isn’t knowing what the law says, it’s coordinating all the moving parts across systems, teams and timelines — especially when so much of the compliance work sits outside or alongside human capital management (HCM) systems.
For years, companies have tried to solve this challenge by adding more tools: a solution for leave, another for employment verifications, another for payroll taxes, and a growing set of spreadsheets and manual workarounds to help keep it all connected. Such a disparate configuration can work until it doesn’t. Inconsistencies such as duplicate data and mismatched worker details can go unnoticed until later, when downstream workflows illuminate the upstream misalignment.
What’s changing now is that connected compliance is finally achievable in a practical way. Modern integration patterns, unified data models, and more scalable approaches to mapping worker-level information mean organizations can stop treating compliance as a maze of point solutions and start treating it like a system.
What we mean by a “compliance tech stack.”
A compliance tech stack is the collection of tools and workflows organizations rely on to complete tasks required to stay compliant across the worker lifecycle, spanning onboarding, employment verification, wage and tax obligations, leave administration, pay reporting and more. The issue isn’t that these tools exist. It’s that they’re typically disconnected, which forces teams to bridge gaps by hand.
Why “worker events” create so much work
A worker event is any change that creates downstream compliance action: hire, rehire, transfer, location change, pay change, leave start/end, status change, or termination. In a fragmented model, every event becomes a new round of manual coordination: re-keying data, validating “which system is right,” and checking whether one change triggered other obligations elsewhere.
The result is predictable: rework becomes part of the operating rhythm rather than an exception.
What a smarter compliance connection achieves
A connected approach to view and coordinate workforce compliance actions can help ensure an organization’s compliance program operates with shared worker-level data. Information moves fluidly across workflows and worker events, and each step is aligned, synchronized and complete.
And as rules vary by location, connection becomes even more critical. As Meg Ferrero, vice president and assistant general counsel at ADP puts it: “Compliance and managing risk are always bigger considerations than simply what the law requires… It’s often possible to develop a standard… that can work in most circumstances and allow you to have a consistent approach.”
What this means for leaders
Leaders responsible for workforce related compliance should shift their mindset from “after-HCM” to “with-HCM” — considering compliance system requirements alongside HCM decisions, not after the fact.
Reduce the hidden cost of fragmentation with fewer reconciliations, fewer late-stage corrections, fewer surprises that surface only after deadlines or payroll runs. In a connected model, compliance work becomes easier to manage because it’s built on consistent worker contextual data and unified workflow continuity, not tedious manual coordination.
Interested in how a connected compliance approach can work in practice? Learn about ADP SmartCompliance®.
