The Shifting Year in the Life of a Workforce Compliance Professional: 7 Key Non-Discrimination Program Responsibilities

What does a typical year have in store for a workforce compliance professional? Despite recent political shifts, your attention should remain on proactively identifying any equity, fairness, and legal vulnerabilities in your organization via your non-discrimination workforce compliance programs. In this article, we’ll walk you through the key activities in the calendar, from project kick-off to monitoring, evaluating, and communicating your strategy to the organization.

A Reminder of How Things Have Changed—And How They Have Not

We originally put out a version of this article back in March 2024, hoping to shed light on the firmly established (but nonetheless multifaceted) “pathway” of annual responsibilities that fell to U.S. federal contractors and compliance professionals. As we’re all no doubt keenly aware, this status quo has been disrupted by the end of the federally mandated gender and race affirmative action era, and the anti-“Illegal-DEI” stance expressed by Executive Order 14173.

However, a key message of this update is perhaps that “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. Considering this shift in the regulatory landscape, compliance professionals would be forgiven for assuming they have less work to do—but the reality is that they now have as much (if not more) to do. This is because:

• Many key requirements and laws still remain in place, including:
  • Federal contractor VETS-4212 reporting
  • Federal contractor VEVRAA AAPs (Veterans)
  • Federal contractor Section 503 AAPs (Individuals with Disabilities)
  • The Equal Pay Act of 1963
  • EEO-1 Reporting (for employers with 100+ employees)
  • Title VII of the Civil Rights Act 1964
  • The Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (UGESP)
  • New hire reporting requirements
  • Various federal contractor and U.S. employer training requirements
• Federal pullback means stronger state-level mandates, and the renewed relevance of existing state-level mandates, including:
  • State contractor EEO/AA obligations
  • State non-discrimination obligations
  • State reporting requirements
  • State training requirements
  • State pay transparency requirements
  • Various global requirements
• Despite the new tenor of its communications, the Department of Justice’s guidance for federal contractors ultimately:
  • Reaffirms that non-discrimination obligations still apply to federal contractors
  • Emphasizes accountability through data, risk assessments, and proactive compliance monitoring

You can find out more about these requirements in the article linked directly below, but in short, the best approach is for organizations to continue data collection, analyze the data they collect, and create a defense against legal and regulatory risk.

LEARN ABOUT YOUR COMPLIANCE REQUIREMENTS | ‘Why Affirmative Action Should Still Be On Your Agenda: When Is an AAP Required at the Federal and State Level?’

The Core Responsibilities of a Workforce Compliance Professional

The following core responsibilities concern the creation, refinement, and communication of your programs and wider workforce analytics efforts. Only by observing each of these points will you be able to manage risk and build a fair and merit-based organization.

Developing a Strategy for Your Workforce Compliance and Non-Discrimination Programs

Compliance professionals should kick off their programs by assembling their project teams, scheduling a kickoff meeting, and starting to build their plan.

The kickoff meeting should:

• Identify workforce compliance plan obligations and reporting requirements, including:
  • Federal contractor requirements such as VEVRAA and Section 503 affirmative action planning, and VETS-4212 reporting
  • Employer requirements such as EEO-1 reporting and plans that validate compliance with federal anti-discrimination laws, such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Pay Act
  • State contractor AAP/EEO plan obligations and reporting
  • Global requirements that address the EU’s Pay Transparency Directive and the UK’s Equality Act
• Define plan structure(s)
• Discuss data specifications
• Identify additional data fields and reporting requirements
• Decide how information will be distributed (reports and/or dashboards) and who will have access

From here, the project team’s responsibilities will include:

• Developing written internal policies and practices that support the organization’s commitment to non-discrimination and its workforce compliance plans
• Ensuring the plans align with the latest regulations governing affirmative action and non-discrimination, along with relevant local, state, and federal laws
• Defining employer (including federal contractor) training obligations for employees
• Develop specific actions with the purpose of:
  • Identifying problem areas
  • Addressing inequities
  • Maintaining and updating policies and practices
  • Self-auditing internal procedures
  • Training employees

Digging Into Your Data and Performing a Statistical Analysis

Once your team has met and your plans and policies have been defined, you’ll want to launch into a comprehensive analysis so you can better understand your current workforce position. This will give you a stable basis for analyzing the effectiveness of your program. You’ll need to:

• Reconcile your employment data for completeness, accuracy, and consistency
• Conduct a comprehensive analysis of applicant and employee data so you can analyze representation and benchmark information by job groups or families throughout the talent lifecycle, from hires to promotions to terminations
• Conduct a comparison of your representation versus current labor market availability, including for veterans and individuals with disabilities
• Perform a compensation analysis using one or more of the following methodologies:
  • 2% or $2,000 tipping test
  • Cohort analysis
  • Pay equity analysis
  • Regression analysis
• Examine selection rates for protected classes across a range of employment activities (hires, promotions, terminations, etc.)
• Examine trends in hiring, promotion, and retention

Establishing Goals and Benchmarks

It won’t be possible to finalize your plans without first assembling your benchmark data and setting appropriate goals based on that data in conjunction with your workforce metrics. Federal agencies set benchmarks for certain groups at specific levels, as detailed below. For the remainder, you’ll need to look at appropriate availability data for the areas in which you operate. Key tasks will include:

• Reviewing utilization of individuals with disabilities in each job group to identify areas where representation is lower than 7%, as per the aspirational goal set by Section 503
• Tracking protected veteran hiring against the VEVRAA Hiring Benchmark for your current reporting year
• Reviewing total workforce representation by protected class to identify areas of opportunity for improvement compared to the benchmark

Keeping Records, Reporting, Monitoring, and Evaluating

While your priority will be to prepare any reports required by a range of regulatory agencies as per relevant federal, state, and local laws, you should also be operating a range of ongoing reporting, monitoring, and evaluation activities. This will help you to ensure the agility and overall effectiveness of your program and make the process of reporting to those agencies more routine.

You should maintain accurate and up-to-date records of workforce data, recruitment activities, employment transactions, and your progress toward your compliance goals. Then you’ll need to:

• Maintain accurate and up-to-date records related to your efforts, including:
  • Applicant data
  • Workforce data
  • Recruitment activities
  • Employment transactions (hires, promotions, and terminations)
• Prepare required reports to regulatory agencies, as mandated by applicable laws and regulations (for example, VETS 4212 and EEO Reporting)
• Regularly assess the effectiveness of non-discrimination and compliance initiatives, and make necessary adjustments
• Review your program during the plan year (and monitor annually or semi-annually)
• Address areas of adverse impact you uncover. In some cases, additional analysis may be needed to remove unintentional barriers in selection practices
• Monitor and evaluate the impact of policies and practices on the workforce
• Conduct internal audits to ensure compliance with applicable laws (federal, state, and local)
• Review compensation and compensation practices, including:
  • Making sure appropriate documentation and support are accessible and explaining pay differences where required
  • Proactively addressing areas of concern and making plans to remedy statistically significant disparities

LEARN HOW AFFIRMITY CAN HELP | ‘Affirmity Unveils Major Platform Update Featuring Advanced Dashboards, PayStat® Enhancements, and New UI’

The Other Ongoing Activities You’ll Be Doing Year-Round

In addition to the responsibilities above, compliance professionals have a range of other tasks throughout the year.

Communicating With the Business and Providing Training

Employers are required to deliver training and provide information on certain topics—and doing so will help your workforce understand what you’re trying to achieve. Some key activities you can expect to perform include:

• Conducting EEO, Section 503, and VEVRAA training for employees, including managers, recruiters, and anyone involved in the hiring process
• Providing appropriate training as required by industry, local, and state laws
• Communicating the organization’s non-discrimination and compliance efforts to employees, stakeholders, and the wider public to promote transparency and accountability
• Providing and publicizing channels through which employees can express their concerns or report discrimination

EXPLORE YOUR TRAINING OPTIONS | ‘Affirmity’s Workforce Compliance Training Catalog’

Performing Ongoing Recruitment and Outreach

While making internal improvements to your processes and to how everyone understands your workforce’s current position will help you make progress toward your goals, you also need to be proactive about attracting a steady flow of suitable candidates. Outreach is an essential point of leverage for your efforts. Therefore, you’ll need to:

• Implement proactive recruitment strategies to attract the best-qualified candidates, including targeted outreach specifically for veterans and individuals with disabilities
• Evaluate and adjust recruitment sources and methods to ensure maximum effectiveness and better inclusion outcomes
• Measure sourcing effectiveness with various recruitment activities to ensure current methods are adding value to the organization’s efforts

Continuously Revisiting Your Selection Processes

Your efforts will likely fail to gain traction if the people you funnel toward your talent pipeline are filtered out by an unfair and imprecise selection process. To ensure this process isn’t counterproductive, you’ll need to periodically review and revise your selection criteria, practices, and procedures with a view to minimizing bias and ensuring a fair evaluation of all candidates. You should also:

• Provide equal opportunities for training, advancement, and promotion within the organization
• Review selection rates for hires, promotions, and terminations to address any areas with adverse impact

Dates You’ll Want in Your Diary (But Be Warned: Many of Them Move!)

Ideally, we’d love to give you a long list of dates, telling you when exactly each of the many federal-, state-, and local-level reports are due. Unfortunately, one of the realities of being a compliance professional is that a significant number of these dates can vary greatly from year to year!

This is one of the reasons why so much of the year we’ve described is filled with ongoing activity—you should be in the position to pull data and respond accurately to a variety of requests whenever they fall.

When creating your own calendar, be sure to research (and sign up to be alerted about) the following dates:

• EEO-1: Since 2018, EEO-1 collection has fallen in a range of different months of the year, including March, April, and October.
• VETS 4212: The deadline has reliably been September 30.
• California Pay Data Reporting: Second Wednesday in May.
• Don’t forget to check this year’s dates for other state-specific reporting, including:
  • Illinois (Equal Pay Act)
  • Minnesota
  • New Jersey
  • New York
  • Ohio
  • Wisconsin

Keep Track of Your Responsibilities—Get the Checklist

Keeping track of everything that need to get done from year to year is critical—so we’ve made a checklist based on the information in this blog post to help you ensure that nothing falls through the cracks!