Brightmine helps streamline HR compliance for BMSS

Name: Rebecca Tipton SHRM-SCP
Title: HR Services Manager
Organization: BMSS, LLC
Industry: Human Resources Consulting

As an HR Services Manager for BMSS, LLC, Rebecca Tipton wears many hats. She provides outsourced HR expertise to BMSS clients, helping them navigate every step of the employee journey, from compliance to benefits, recruitment, training and development, and people strategies.

One of the most challenging parts of her job is the time-consuming task of managing the high volume of legislative and policy changes while remaining cost-efficient for her clients. She needed to find a way streamline HR compliance research.

The challenge

Keeping up with hundreds of HR compliance updates

BMSS clients work in more than a dozen industries and have employees across the US. This creates significant complexity for their human resources team. With states and counties having different regulations, Rebecca must provide accurate advice on all aspects of HR so that her clients stay compliant. But as new laws pass, policies shift, or when clients add benefits, Rebecca must quickly determine the impact of those changes and help her clients adjust. 

To understand how those changes affect her clients, Rebecca had to thoroughly research individual state department websites, which can be tricky to navigate. Tracking the volume of changes was time-consuming, Rebecca said, as more than 300 legal changes took effect in the United States in 2022, and just as many in 2023. 

Keeping up with the information was also complicated, she adds. “If a client in five different states wanted to implement a policy, we’d need to ensure all the state laws would accommodate it or know what we’d need to adjust for it. I could easily spend an hour per state to research that and make sure we had all our ducks covered.”

Lengthy legal research also increased client fees. “We want to mitigate that and be efficient. I also have to make sure I spend my time well.”

The results

Saved time, money and resources

With the Brightmine HR & Compliance Center, Rebecca is saving time and resources. Most importanly, she’s saving both BMSS and her clients money, spending less time on legal research and creating or updating important documents.

1. Customized legal alerts

Now, instead of wondering if she’s missed new legislation, Rebecca relies on the daily email updates from the HR & Compliance Center.

“They give a succinct description of which states have introduced new legislation with a link to the HR & Compliance Center site, which provides the specifics. I can reach out to clients, update them, and provide any policies or guidance they need.”

2. Policy templates and multi-state handbook guidance

When companies change policies, such as adding parental leave or expanding on retirement benefits, templates from the HR & Compliance Center help ensure the wording meets legal requirements.

Rebecca added that the employee handbook resource, which designates which policies she needs to include when a client adds a new state to the roster, has reduced the time required to create a new handbook by more than 30%.

3. Immediate answers to compliance questions

Rebecca’s clients rely on her for ad hoc answers to questions like ‘what is allowable in benefits and retirement programs or how to handle employee relations issues.’ Now, she keeps the HR & Compliance Center tab open on her browser so she can immediately answer any question.

With the HR & Compliance Center, Rebecca has been able to streamline HR compliance research.

Now, Rebecca can ensure her clients have the correct information when or before they need it, helping her be proactive and build a trusting and valuable partnership.