5 key steps to enhance workplace policy compliance

Dan Hawtrey
3 December 2025

Compliance is critical for protecting an organisation from legal and financial risks, maintaining its reputation, and ensuring smooth operations. To avoid compliance failure, organisations must implement robust policies and procedures, provide regular training, and utilise compliance management tools. These tools help monitor regulatory changes, track compliance status, facilitate timely updates to policies and procedures and more.

A proactive, intentional, and comprehensive approach to policy compliance not only safeguards the organisation, particularly those in regulated industries, but also fosters trust among stakeholders.

But all too often policy compliance is not a given. The elements that block successful compliance can be cultural, but can also sometimes be smaller, logistical details that prevent successful policy management, but can be successfully dealt with if you take the right steps.

In this post we’re going to take a deep dive into policy compliance and the steps you need to take to improve levels of compliance.

What is policy compliance?

Policy compliance is the level to which your managers and employees follow the procedures and guidelines covered in your policies. For this to be able to happen, three things need to happen:

Why is policy compliance so important?

Policy compliance is essential for a number of reasons, including:

Ensuring your organisation is complying with different laws and regulations including GDPR, HIPAA and more.
Keeping employees safe, as well as supporting health and wellbeing.
Protecting the data of employees, customers, and suppliers.
Supporting key organisational processes and maintaining standards.
Driving efficiency and supporting productivity.
Gaining certification such as ISO 27001.
Passing any kind of audit or inspection.
Delivering the very best customer service.
Standardising processes across different teams, departments, and locations.
And many more!

How can we achieve policy compliance?

Achieving compliance with key policies is not always straightforward, can take time and is never guaranteed. However, if you take a holistic approach and adopt a number of different steps and tactics, then you are very likely to succeed in increasing compliance levels. These steps include:

Let’s look at each of these steps in more detail.

Making policy compliance a strategic priority

Making policy compliance happen requires it to be an organisational priority, ideally leading to a “culture” of compliance.

Get leadership buy-in

Generally, increasing policy compliance needs be a top-down effort where it is clear to employees that senior leaders expect them to follow the policies that are in place. It is worth getting leadership buy-in to ensure that they are on side with a view to improving policy compliance. If your C-suite backs you it is easier to:

show you are committed and serious about policy compliance
align any related messaging across your organisation
influence the actions of individual stakeholders and policy owners
make the case for investing in any required policy management solutions such as Xoralia
get any related change communications noticed, especially if they have leadership input or attribution.

Get commitment from stakeholders and policy owners

Responsibility for enforcing policies and increasing compliance is an ensemble effort and devolved across different business functions. For example, your HR function will be driving compliance for people-related policies, and your IT team will be doing the same for technology-related policies and so on. Increasing policy compliance throughout your organisation is dependent on their actions and buy-in; the good news is that they are usually keen to enforce policies and should support any push to drive up compliance.

Align policies to existing risk, compliance, or strategic efforts

Policies don’t exist in a vacuum – they are there for a reason, including to minimise risk and compliance efforts, or achieve wider strategic aims. Most of the time a link between a policy and a wider aim is obvious, such as a series of health & safety policies and ensuring there is a spotless safety record. At other times this might not be the case, for example policies that support employee retention. Where possible, ensure policies align with wider strategic aims, so there is a strong reason for compliance, both in the eyes of the stakeholder managing the policy, and the employee who needs to follow the policy. Sometimes there may also be an opportunity to use an obvious milestone – such as the date of audit or inspection – to help build momentum and ensure action.

Make a business case for investment if required

Depending on your approach, you may need to acquire a policy management solution to ensure policy compliance and do the heavy lifting around policy lifecycle management, user access, administration, reporting, and more. Starting any business case early may be critical.

Getting your policies up to date

Policy compliance relies on policies that are up to date and are perceived by employees as being up to date. Without this, policies are more likely to be ignored, and compliance harder to achieve.

Establish clear ownership

Policies require active management so they are up to date. This requires clear ownership. Ensure every policy has a named individual as an owner who is responsible for keeping it up to date, encouraging accountability. Sometimes policies are owned by a department such as HR, but having a specific person is usually necessary. Within Xoralia, every policy has a clear owner that is transparent for all to see, helping drive accountability.

Get policies up to date

You can’t expect managers and employees to follow policies if they are out of date or if there are multiple versions circulating. Therefore, any initiative to increase compliance must start with policy owners reviewing and getting their policies updated as a baseline and clearly identifying these as the very latest versions.

Establish clear policy review and approval workflows

Getting some policies up to date may not be straightforward and can involve delays if:

a policy may require review and approval from multiple stakeholders.
it is not clear who needs to be involved in reviewing and approving a policy.
you are using email to distribute policies for review, leading to bottlenecks, problems with version control and more.

A solution like Xoralia eliminates these issues. Review and approval workflow for each policy can be set, with clear stages, associated target dates, status updates, automated notifications, and more. It brings both clarity, transparency and automation to streamline the process and ultimately ensure policies are up to date.

Removing barriers to accessing polices

To encourage compliance, make it as easy as possible for employees to find and access your policies by removing any unnecessary barriers.

Establish a central library and one source of truth

The easiest way to ensure policies are findable is having a central library where everyone can access them, for example through your intranet. This library should also provide one source of truth so there aren’t competing versions of the same policy. A solution like Xoralia, is based around establishing a central library and one source of truth, opening up your policies to everyone.

Make policies findable

Policies also need to be findable to drive compliance. Having a central policy library goes a long way to improve findability but policies also need to be easily findable through any Microsoft, SharePoint, or intranet search. Within your library, having a specific policy search with meaningful filters such as a policy area (e.g. HR, Health & Safety, IT security etc.), as well as the ability to browse through policies, will help employees find what they need. Again, these are all capabilities available in the Xoralia product.

Use personalisation

In large, global organisations or businesses with complex structures or multiple locations, there will be some policies that apply to some parts of the business and not to others. Using personalisation and audience targeting – usually based on Microsoft Entra ID profiles – is the best way to ensure only employees see the policies that are relevant to them. Xoralia enables personalisation and targeting, leveraging Entra ID data and Microsoft 365 groups.

Embed policies in the flow of work across Microsoft 365 and Teams

Many organisations have a digital workplace based on Microsoft 365. Ensuring employees can effortlessly access your policy library from the systems they work in everyday is perhaps the single most important element to reduce barriers to ensure policy compliance.

Xoralia is built specifically for Microsoft 365 so it embeds seamlessly into a SharePoint intranet and Microsoft Teams. Uniquely Xoralia also comes with a selection of pre-built, attractive SharePoint web parts targeted to different roles which can all be configured and embedded within SharePoint sites. Xoralia also comes with a Teams app so employees can access policies directly within Teams, for example easily referencing policies in Teams chats.

Use inclusive language with guidelines

Policies can be long-winded documents written in “legalease” with pages and pages of small print. These are extremely unlikely to be read and followed. Policies should always be written so they can be understood and are clear, usually with guidelines and summaries of the essential points.

Align with Copilot and AI

Many organisations are implementing Microsoft Copilot or other AI technologies, which employees use to ask questions and find items. As documents within Xoralia policies are housed in SharePoint libraries, this ensures your policies can easily be referenced by Copilot, again making it easier for users to find the policy they need.

Introducing employee attestation processes

Introducing an employee attestation process that requires employees to acknowledge they have read and understood a policy is critical for compliance. This involves asking employees to digitally confirm they have read, understood and agree to a policy.

Introduce attestation processes

Introducing an employee attestation for policies is critical for compliance. There are multiple reasons for this; by introducing attestation it shows employees that policy compliance is expected, and it also introduces the opportunity to report on and improve compliance. Attestation ensures that organisations are intentional about raising compliance, and this focus will reap results. In Xoralia, our user-friendly “easy attestation” features consistently drives high compliance rates.

Use reporting to track success

Employee attestation provides teams with a tangible way to measure the level of compliance. Granular reporting can also tell you who hasn’t completed the process, so you can then make appropriate interventions and communication to improve the level. In Xoralia, reporting on attestation can even be integrated into a Power BI dashboard if necessary.

Use notifications and targeting

Employees are busy. Using automated notifications to remind people to either start a new employee attestation process or send them another reminder helps drive adoption. Here audience targeting also ensure reminders only to go the right groups, making the employee attestation process far more efficient. These features are all hard baked into Xoralia’s policy management solution.

Use quizzes

Of course, employee attestation doesn’t completely guarantee compliance. In Xoralia we also include a feature for employees to have to answer questions about a policy to show that they have actually read it. Content owners can create a custom quiz or select standard questions. This popular feature helps to embed understanding and also shows regulators that you are going the extra mile to drive compliance.

Making policy compliance sustainable

Policy compliance isn’t a one-time effort. It needs to be ongoing and truly sustainable; several factors can help make this happen.

Use automation

Using manual interventions to drive policy compliance is simply not sustainable. However, you can use automation to do some of the heavy lifting including notifying employees about policies, running most of the employee attestation process, compiling reports, resetting annual attestation processes and more. If you want to make policy compliance sustainable it is usually essential to invest in policy management software that successfully automates manual effort.

Support policy owners

Policy compliance relies on policy owners keeping their documents up to date, but sometimes despite the best intentions, they don’t carry this out. Making it easier for your policy owners to manage their policies can increase the chances of ongoing compliance. Features built in Xoralia include that help policy owners, including:

custom approval workflow for creating and reviewing policies
automated review notifications
clear views of the policies a person owns
and more!

Embed in employee onboarding

Employee onboarding usually involves employees having attest to different policies. Embedding policy compliance into your onboarding programme will save time and support ongoing compliance. If your policy management solution supports personalisation, you should be able to target policies to new starters and even automatically run the relative attestation process for any person joining your organisation.

How Xoralia supports policy compliance?

In this article, we’ve covered what you need to do to drive policy compliance. Virtually all of the steps that we’ve mentioned are supported by policy management software like Xoralia, that:

Establishes a central policy library with search and browsing options.
Supports clear ownership of policies and supports owners through the policy management lifecycle.
Ensures there is one source of truth for policies, establishing the employee trust that is important for compliance.
Automates the employee attestation process, so you can “set and forget,” but also includes quizzes to really embed compliance.
Has all the reporting required to monitor and improve policy compliance.
Uses automation and personalisation to do much of the heavy lifting of all the above.
Supports policy owners with policy lifecycle management tools.
Effortlessly integrates with your Microsoft 365 digital workplace, SharePoint intranet and Microsoft Teams, supported with a range of additional web parts and a native Teams app.

If you’re serious about improving policy compliance, then investing in a solution like Xoralia is essential. Why not book a free demo?

Frequently asked questions

How does a policy management solution increase policy compliance?

Policy management solutions include many features which support policy compliance. These include facilitating easy access to policies through a central policy library, lifecycle tools to help policy owners keep policies up to date, and employee attestation features so employees read mandatory policies. Policy management software will also include reporting to track success and monitor the attestation process, as well as automated reminders. All these features are essential in supporting policy compliance.

How does employee attestation support policy compliance?

Employee attestation is a process where employees digitally confirm that they have read, understood, and will comply with a policy. This is usually mandatory. Solutions that support employee attestation also include reporting to track success and send out automated reminders to employees who have yet to confirm. This feature is a tried and tested way to drive policy compliance as employees need to explicitly confirm they will follow a policy.

What is the best way to increase policy compliance?

There is no one single way to increase policy compliance, but a range of tactics can make a difference. These include making policy compliance a strategic priority, ensuring policies are up to date, and then removing barriers to adoption – for example making policies easy to access and embedding them in everyday workflows. Using an employee attestation feature for mandatory policies will also increase policy compliance.

The story behind Xoralia

Xoralia was built by the team at Content Formula, an intranet and digital workplace consultancy that has built SharePoint intranets for some of the world’s most famous companies. Now, most companies want their policies and procedures on the intranet but they don’t just want to store them there, they also want tools to help better manage them. Over the years we came across just about every single requirement for a policy management system. As this article above explains, there are gaps in SharePoint and so we never built what in our mind was the perfect policy management system.

However, one of our clients challenged us to build something for them that filled all the gaps but still used SharePoint at the back end. We had a great relationship with them and agreed to share the budget to do this, provided we could then market the solution to others. That was in 2019. We’re now on version 3 of Xoralia and the product has grown and evolved a lot.

3 benefits you can expect from Xoralia

Make it easy to find policies

Centralised policy library with powerful search and filtering.

Reduce administrative burden

Automations and notifications so that all policy tasks are carried out on time

Demonstrate compliance and best practice

Sophisticated tracking and dashboards to drive and measure compliance.

And lots more!

What our clients say

AppSource review

A great time saver and tool for document management

We have found Xoralia to be very beneficial to us as it has allowed us to focus on other area’s as Xoralia will take care of who has read the documents and notify them if they have not. A great time saver and tool for document management all together.

Tim Galer

IT Coordinator

Hughes

Ideal partner for our regulated environment

LifeArc operates in a strictly regulated sector where compliance and information security are critical. It is essential that LifeArc’s workforce have easy and effortless access to the latest up-to-date policies and procedures, which is the structure Xoralia gave us.

Adam Lythgoe

IT Manager

LifeArc

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