Mistakes in the governance/compliance side of your business are getting increasingly expensive. As we approach 2026, there’s several new laws that need to be embedded into your HR policies – new minimum wage and exempt status benchmarks just to name a few. From hiring practices, new IRS scrutiny on 1099 contractors, to new benchmarks related to wage-and-hour compliance, we continue to see our clients tightening their internal compliance requirements. Most importantly we see companies of all sizes prioritizing and tightening up their HR policies and practices, treating regulatory compliance as a strategic activity, not just an administrative process.
What’s Wrong with Check-the-Box Approaches
If you’re a multi-state employer, its important you stay on top of training requirements in any state where you do business. And if your company is subject to mandatory training requirements, you can’t just rely on a check the box approach. Any training you conduct that has a regulatory framework must be conducted in a way where the information most important to operational effectiveness actually sticks, not just checks off boxes on a checklist. To be taken seriously, compliance and the training that is part of its implementation needs to be perceptually linked to each employee’s everyday behaviors and decisions. You can’t over talk issues of compliance.
Workplace Harassment is Still an Issue!
Harassment prevention is still the kingpin of the compliance training industry. For good reason – issues with harassment are still happening at a click none of us would have expected over a decade ago when it came into vogue.
While some organizations deliver the same onboarding or annual training on harassment, we find that many of these trainings are often narrowly targeted towards issues of gender rather than covering the full array of harassment possibilities which include harassment based on religion, race, or age. If you have an anti-harassment training program in your organization, this is a perfect venue for reinforcing your commitments to inclusivity — which is really a form of “compliance” in an up close and personal way.
Teaching your leaders how to spot different forms of harassment or discrimination, including how to handle Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requests, is a way to not just prevent a lawsuit but to avoid unnecessary turnover. Your goal is for your leadership to spot and correct potential problems before they become real.
You Need to Find the Gaps
The biggest compliance failures are often issues that happen in plain sight. Small to mid-sized companies often assume that compliance management is a problem only faced by big companies – and that’s exactly what causes them to be vulnerable to issues
While harassment training often gets the compliance spotlight in the training industry, wage-and-hour mistakes or overlooking safety concerns, are self-created problems driven by simply being too complacent. Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) “misclassifications” in particular have costly consequences. In Washington State for example, an employee whose work has historically been considered exempt, must now earn well over $80K in 2026 to be classified as exempt from overtime requirements. Have you made sure that all your employees classified as exempt meet this pay standard?
Compliance Isn’t One and Done!
Training your staff on the issues of compliance isn’t a one-time end of year event. Nor is it something you train on once and not talk about again. At PACE we make discussions of our client’s compliance standards a part of our daily operations and embed their compliance standards into our recruiting and hiring processes. A commitment to make compliance requirements a continuous learning event makes it easier to adapt when new laws or technologies emerge and bring new requirements into your regulatory framework. AI, for example, is a new technology that will likely require ongoing review. When knowledge, policy, and training around issues of compliance become routine, organizations reinforce a culture of accountability.
Final Thoughts…
The compliance landscape in Washington State is not likely to slow down in 2026. As high-risk issues like FLSA misclassifications and expanding AI regulation continue to be front and center, we can’t predict every mandate that is likely to come our way. The employers that treat conversations and trainings around compliance as a strategic and continuous process, not just something that is subject to an annual review or execution, are most likely to avoid costly mistakes. They’ll also most likely to earn the trust of their people and customers.
