The ongoing pandemic-induced work environment has brought new compliance challenges for employers and human resources professionals. In addition, ever changing compliance requirements exacerbate these complexities. With more than seventeen years of experience, Osha4Less has established itself as a highly regarded compliance solution provider for companies across various industries, helping them untangle regulatory complexities with simplified solutions, including labor law poster compliance and workplace safety products.

In an interview with Manage HR, Paul Abel, Founder of Osha4Less, and Patrick Saeger, COO at Osha4Less, share valuable insights on how their solutions are helping employers provide a safe and compliant environment for their workforce by helping them adapt to the ever-changing compliance and OSHA guidelines.

Please give us an overview of Osha4Less and walk us through the conception story behind the company?

The essence of our business is to make HR’s job easy. Our services and solutions are designed to help employers provide a safe and compliant working environment and help them avoid costly lawsuits and litigation.

The conception of the company was inspired by an incident that occurred at a previous venture. I was an owner of several franchises in San Diego with hundreds of employees. One of my employees had an accident operating a piece of machinery and suffered a serious injury. Even though I thought that I had done everything right to maintain a compliant workplace, when the incident caught the attention of a state labor law inspector, they pointed out several compliance violations and levied fines, in areas that included safety and various poster requirements. I was frustrated that there were no resources that made it easy for business owners to have everything they needed for workplace compliance. In that moment, the mission behind Osha4less was born – provide resources to help employers keep up with the ever changing compliance requirements, and help them avoid fines and lawsuits.

How does Osha4Less’ service help clients align with the changing compliance requirements in this pandemic-induced work environment?

The current hybrid and remote work environment has expanded the responsibility of human resource professionals and made their job a lot more difficult. Notably for our business, the compliance and labor laws are changing at an unprecedented rate, and compliance for remote workers is an entirely new complexity. For example, placing some labor law posters in the breakroom is no longer enough to ensure compliance. Employers have the same obligation to provide these notices to their remote employees. Making it more complicated is that in many cases, notice requirements are specific to the work location of the employee. For example, an employee whose corporate office is in New York may work remotely from a city in California. The labor laws pertaining to the employee are very different. After all, the liberties and entitlements of labor laws vary from state to state, and even city to city. To comply in this new world, human resources or compliance departments now have to somehow send out multiple posters, and then monitor for changing requirements. Not only does this aspect divert HR professionals from their key business activities, but it also adds even more to the difficulty of providing a safe and compliant work environment everywhere their employees are working.

To help address this problem, we created ePosterService, a patent-pending solution that puts the entire labor law poster compliance process on autopilot for remote employees. ePosterService has proven to be a valuable asset to companies in this post-pandemic remote/hybrid work environment, helping them take a compliance problem that was difficult to solve, and then make it very easy and automated.

Could you please share a customer success story to substantiate the value proposition of Osha4less?

One example is that of a large national insurance firm with offices and employees spanning several states. Post COVID-19, many of their employees started working remotely, and some even migrated to other cities and states. The new reality forced the HR team in this organization to recognize the apparent gaps in adhering to labor law poster requirements. Initially, they tried to solve these concerns by downloading various posters and notices, but they soon struggled to keep up with the changing policies and their variation depending on employee location. This client was looking for a partner to help them overcome these obstacles, and they found us online.

We stepped into the picture and helped them solve their problem. Our team aided the client in understanding how our ePosterService solution can automate the entire process. We created a hybrid solution for them, combining our labor law posters with compliance updates that go with the physical poster and the online ePosterService for remote employees. Now that client is fully compliant with both the remote onsite and hybrid workers.

What differentiates Osha4Less from the rest of the players in this space?

One of our key differentiators is that we always pay attention to our customer’s pain points and their unique requirements. We focus on innovation to create solutions that help employers solve these problems at an affordable price. Unlike some product and service providers, we do not look at ourselves as a product manufacturer - we are passionate about helping businesses of all sizes simplify compliance and avoid fines and lawsuits. We are highly client centric, and always focused on doing the right thing for them.