Area of expertise
Social, legal & labor-relations compliance
Advisory and capacity building — Employment law · Social dialogue · Audit
Social compliance audit, internal rules, social dialogue, HR legal advice, association compliance. A legal reading applied to the concrete situations of the business, not a commentary on the labor code.
- Typical duration
- 4 to 8 weeks for a full audit
- Main deliverable
- Audit report + remediation plan
- Counterparts
- HR director, legal department, social partners
- Handover
- Training of the HR teams included
The problem
A labor dispute is prepared months before it erupts.
A labor conflict rarely arrives without ignored signals before it: internal rules never updated since a labor-code reform, a disciplinary procedure followed from memory rather than in writing, a representative body convened late. Each of these gaps, taken alone, looks minor. Before a court or a labor inspectorate, it is their accumulation that costs.
The symptom shows in a legal budget that grows year on year without any case being truly complex: it is not the difficulty of the cases that rises, it is the number of files badly started.
These situations have a common cause: social compliance is treated as a reaction to an incident rather than as a regular audit. An audit carried out outside any dispute almost always costs less than a single badly prepared case.
Social compliance is never better measured than outside a conflict. Once the conflict is open, you are no longer doing compliance: you are doing defense.
Warning sign
If your internal rules have not been reviewed since the last significant labor-law reform, they probably no longer protect you the way they did when written.
The intervention cycle
Seven steps, two of them specific to this domain.
The two dashed steps vary by domain; the other five are common to all six chains.
- Understand
- Assess
- Consolidate
- Design
- Secure
- Prevent
- Deploy
Fields of application
Where this domain works in practice.
Employment law & contracts
Contracts, working time, pay and disciplinary procedures.
Social compliance
Legal obligations and clients’ social-audit standards.
Social dialogue
Representative bodies, consultations, negotiation and agreements.
Conflict prevention
Social climate, regulation, mediation and crisis exit.
The competency chain
12 competencies, across two axes and a pivot
Axis 1 establishes and measures. Axis 2 builds. The pivot names the point where one turns into the other.
Axis 1
Compliance audit and assessment of the social climate
Establish the real compliance of practices and the level of social tension.
- 01
Social compliance audit
Contracts, working time, pay, mandatory registers and reporting obligations.
- 02
Analysis of disciplinary practices and litigation
Procedures actually followed, sanctions imposed, ongoing disputes and recurring grounds.
- 03
Assessment of the social-dialogue arrangement
Functioning of the bodies, regularity of consultations and the real quality of exchanges.
- 04
Diagnosis of the social climate and tensions
Warning signals, demands, latent conflict and triggering factors.
- 05
Appraisal against clients’ requirements
Clients’ and funders’ social-audit standards, observed gaps and contractual risks.
- 06
Participatory feedback and consolidation
Sharing the findings with management and staff representatives, and ranking the gaps.
Pivot — from the observed risk to the regulation in place
Axis 2
Compliance remediation and engineering of social dialogue
Turn the observed gaps into instruments, rules and regulation mechanisms.
- 07
Compliance remediation plan
Ranked gaps, corrective actions, responsibilities, deadlines and associated costs.
- 08
Development of legal instruments and templates
Standard contracts, internal rules, disciplinary procedures and service notes.
- 09
Structuring of the social-dialogue arrangement
Calendar of the bodies, agendas, information and consultation circuits.
- 10
Negotiation frameworks and agreements
Preparation of negotiations, framing of positions and drafting of company agreements.
- 11
Training and equipping of supervisors
Applied employment law, conduct of interviews and prevention of risk situations.
- 12
Regulation mechanisms and crisis management
Alert arrangement, mediation and support in situations of open conflict.
Our services
Six services, from audit to securing the texts.
Social compliance is built upstream. Each service aims to reduce the number of files that would later become disputes.
01
Social compliance audit
Assessment of gaps against the labor code and applicable texts, a remediation plan ranked by risk.
- Full documentary review (contracts, registers, postings)
- Interviews with HR and staff representatives
- Gaps rated by risk level
- A dated and prioritized remediation plan
02
Internal rules & agreements
Drafting or updating of the internal rules and collective agreements, filing with the competent authorities.
- Compliance diagnosis of the existing text
- Full drafting or revision
- Consultation of the representative bodies
- Support with the regulatory filing
03
Social dialogue
Structuring of the representative bodies, preparation and support of collective bargaining.
- Assessment of the existing bodies
- A social calendar and structured agendas
- Preparation of negotiation positions
- Legally enforceable minutes
04
Conflict management
Mediation between parties, securing of disciplinary procedures before any decision.
- Mediation between the parties concerned
- Verification of the procedure before decision
- Secured drafting of disciplinary instruments
- Follow-up of internal appeal routes
05
HR legal advice
Employment contracts, terminations, restructurings, secured upstream rather than corrected downstream.
- Review of the contract templates in use
- Securing of termination procedures
- Support of restructurings
- Operational legal notes, not theoretical ones
06
Association compliance
Statutes, internal rules and association governance compliant with Moroccan association law.
- Drafting of compliant statutes
- Internal rules and internal procedures
- Support of the constitutive assembly
- Filing and tax obligations clarified
Typical deliverables
What appears in a proposal — a document, not an intention.
Every deliverable is handed over in an editable format, with its documentation. You are never dependent on the firm to keep it up to date.
- Compliance audit report
- Internal rules
- Social dialogue calendar and files
- Secured disciplinary procedures
- HR legal notes
- Association statutes and internal rules
An example
Industrial company — social audit and social dialogue.
- The situation
- An industrial company facing growing social tension, with no clear view of its own compliance gaps nor a structured framework for dialogue with staff representatives.
- What we did
- Full compliance audit against the labor code, direct support for preparing and conducting the collective bargaining, securing of the most exposed internal procedures.
- What was delivered
- An audit report ranked by risk level, a dated remediation plan, and a structured social-dialogue arrangement with a calendar and template agendas.
- What stayed
- The dispute management feared at the framing stage never happened. That is the result we aim for: what does not happen is not measured, but it is often the real deliverable.
A real engagement, presented by sector. The client name is given as a reference in tender submissions, with their written consent.
Timelines and conditions
What to plan for on your side.
Duration. A social compliance audit takes 4 to 6 weeks for a medium-sized company. The full drafting or revision of internal rules adds 3 to 5 weeks, consultation of the bodies included.
Internal availability. Access to the social documents — contracts, staff register, minutes of the bodies — conditions the speed of the audit more than its method. A social file that is incomplete or scattered across several departments lengthens the timeline noticeably.
Success conditions. A management ready to hear uncomfortable findings without trying to minimize them; involvement of the legal department or the company’s usual counsel, to ensure continuity after we leave; and a remediation calendar actually followed, not simply archived.
What we refuse. Drafting internal rules or a procedure meant to cover, after the fact, a decision already taken and already contested. A legal text written to dress up a decision protects no one; it generally worsens the file if examined.
Cost
The price depends on the number of consultant-days, not on the size of your organization. We state the daily rate, the number of days per step and what each step produces. The framing consultation is free.
References for this domain
The organizations that trust us.
32 organizations supported, across every sector.
TOURBA
Mediouna Services S.A — شركة التنمية مديونة خدمات ش.م
Ministère de l'Équipement et du Transport — Royaume du Maroc
Ministère de la Fonction Publique et de la Modernisation de l'Administration
Ministère de l'Habitat, de l'Urbanisme et de la Politique de la Ville
Conseil National des Droits de l'Homme (CNDH)
Agence Nationale pour le Développement de l'Aquaculture (ANDA)
Zoo de Rabat
District Autonome d'Abidjan
UNESCO
Coopération allemande — Deutsche Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)
BTC–CTB, Belgian Development Agency
FDFP — Fonds de Développement de la Formation Professionnelle (Côte d'Ivoire)
Institut Français Casablanca
Campus Veolia Environnement
Amendis
Redal
RADEEL — Régie de distribution d'eau et d'électricité, Larache
TAQA Morocco
JESA
Webhelp
Philip Morris International
SIANA — maintenance des rames à grande vitesse
Altadis
CFR
DIRA — Dirafrost
Groupe Maroc Soir
Global Media Strategic Consulting
Med Radio
Fondation Zakoura
Zakoura Academy
Fondation Wasl wa Idmaj
Our services
4 services, available separately
Frequently asked questions
Does a social compliance audit trigger filing obligations?
The audit itself remains an internal diagnostic exercise. Some observed gaps may however require filing regularisations: we identify them and leave you the decision to start the process, at the pace that suits you.
Do you intervene when a conflict is already open?
Yes, but our added value is greater upstream. Once the conflict is open, the intervention is more crisis management than preventive audit; we say so clearly at the framing stage.
Does association compliance follow the same rules as company compliance?
No. Moroccan association law follows a framework distinct from the labor code, with its own statutory and filing obligations; that is why this service is handled separately, with a dedicated method.
Do you replace the company's usual legal counsel?
No, and it is not our role. We work upstream, on organization and prevention; the company’s usual legal counsel remains the natural contact for litigation and representation.
The other practices
Human capital & HR
Workforce planning · Frameworks · Appraisal · HRIS
Training engineering
Master plan · Programs · Evaluation
Management consulting
Processes · Change · Risk · Service quality
Local governance
Local authorities · PPP · Procurement · Territories
Governance of artificial intelligence
Dashboards · Simulators · AI governance
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Human capital, training, organization, governance, compliance or artificial intelligence — our teams support you in Morocco and internationally.