Syntactic Equivalence: What is it & How it Affects Compliance
Let's talk about one of compliance's most unnecessarily intimidating terms - syntactic equivalence.
Sounds scary, right? Like something you'd need a PhD in linguistics to understand. But here's the thing – you already understand this simple concept. You've been living it every day without even knowing it had such a pretentious name.
What Even IS Syntactic Equivalence?
Picture this: Your company's privacy policy says "We protect your personal data." Next quarter, legal decides it sounds slightly better as "We safeguard your personal information."
Congratulations! You just witnessed syntactic equivalence in action. Same meaning, different outfit.
Why Compliance Loves This Concept (And Why You Should Too)
In the onboarding world, syntactic equivalence is your best friend – even if it has a terrible personality based on its name alone.
Here's why it matters: Businesses both large and small are constantly tweaking their policies, declarations, and requirements as a matter of course.
When I was a professional wedding photographer in Brisbane, during the slow COVID years one my favourite pastimes (and yes I did actually enjoy it!) was adding new clauses to my contracts.
It wasn’t until version 37 that the document actually matured to the point where I was totally happy with it.
The point is though, you don't want to re-onboard every single contractor just because you changed "shall" to "will" in an onboarding process. That's where our fancy friend syntactic equivalence saves the day.
The user pain point is this: "Do I really need to make my vendors go through an onboarding process again just because the wording changed slightly?"
In WorkZerk you need to make that decision (whether compliance is syntactically equivalent) at the point you decide to modify any existing Onboarding Template.
When you do, you will be presented with a dialog box with this question:
You have updated an Onboarding Template which is linked to historic compliance responses. Would you like to GRANDFATHER all existing responses to this new template version because both versions are equivalent (aka 'Syntactically Equivalent')? Or choose UNBOARD to set affected Members to not Onboarded.
The reason you only have two options is to preserve the integrity of the compliance history. This way the portal member is either ‘still compliant’ or ‘not compliant’ depending on your choices.
Whether you choose Grandfather or Unboard, the individual members will not be emailed or contacted. This gives you the opportunity to inform them if required (for example if they do actually need to be onboarded again).
The Bottom Line
Syntactic equivalence sounds like academic jargon because, well, it kind of is. But don't let the fancy name fool you – it's just a way of saying "these two things mean the same thing, even though they're written differently."
If you do change an Onboarding Template in WorkZerk, if the meaning of the compliance is equivalent (syntactically) you do not need to force all members to onboard again, but it’s your choice to make at that time.
