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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dan Hawtrey is CEO of Content Formula and the driving force behind Xoralia, a policy management platform built natively on Microsoft 365. Dan writes regularly on policy management, compliance, and the evolving role of AI in how organisations manage knowledge. His articles are grounded in real conversations with the companies and teams using Xoralia day to day.
In a 30-minute demo you will see how Xoralia runs inside your own Microsoft 365 tenant - from distribution and attestation through to a continuously built audit trail.
