Compliance isn’t getting any easier
Compliance managers have always had a lot on their plates, but in recent years, their workload and the demands placed on them have only increased. Research from Regology shows that 92% of compliance professionals believe their job has become more difficult.
One of the core reasons for this is a more complex regulatory landscape. The latest PwC Global Compliance Survey finds that 85% of compliance and governance leaders believe compliance requirements have become more complex over the past few years. And this means it is harder for compliance teams to stay on top of everything: the Regology survey finds that nearly 44% of compliance professionals struggle to keep up with regulatory changes.
More complex and faster-evolving compliance requirements ramp up the pressure on compliance teams, not only because of stakeholder demands but also because there has not always been investment in additional team members or technology to handle the extra workload. Nervous executives stress the urgency of compliance, but compliance teams are required to do more with fewer resources.
Audit challenges with compliance policy management
The sharp end of greater compliance complexity and resourcing challenges is often felt in audits. Compliance audits can feel like a tightrope walk, partly because there is a lot to cover, but also because you have to rely on the actions of people around the business who are already “maxed out”, yet responsibility ultimately falls on your shoulders. The result is that some audits are stressful rather than straightforward for compliance teams.
There are also particular challenges relating to policy management, especially in providing evidence required for an audit to show that staff have read policies and procedures. Some compliance teams still have to rely on manual or partly manual approaches, sending emails to have employees confirm they have read a policy and then logging the replies in a spreadsheet.
There may also be a similarly painful manual exercise in asking policy owners to ensure their policies are up to date.
Resorting to manual approaches leads to multiple problems:
- Compliance teams burn vast amounts of time on mindless admin, inevitably making the audit a “mad scramble” to get everything done.
- There is a greater risk of errors and things getting missed, for example, with policies that aren’t up to date, or disappointing low compliance rates around reading mandatory policies.
- Reporting remains manual and even unconvincing, so compliance is not strongly verified for the auditors.
- There is an absence of audit trails or logs relating to policy management.
- The whole audit experience leads to frayed nerves for the compliance team and potentially for your senior leaders.
What is an audit-ready policy system?
But compliance audits don’t have to be stressful.
An audit-ready policy system or software provides peace of mind across all aspects of policy management for an upcoming audit. It means everything is in place and up to date for policy management.
More broadly, it is a compliance automation platform: one that removes manual effort and human error from policy lifecycle management, replacing spreadsheets, email chains and ad hoc processes with automated, auditable workflows.
All the associated challenges of an audit around manual reporting, the mad rush to gather evidence, and the heightened risk of errors are gone, thanks to a combination of automation, relevant features, and the right bells and whistles.
What does an audit-ready policy system look like?
An audit-ready policy solution such as Xoralia will tick several critical boxes.
Automation at the core
Organisations that rely on manual compliance processes that are cumbersome, error-prone and never scalable will never be audit-ready. An audit-ready policy system has automation at its core in most areas, including reporting, notifications, reminders, workflows and more.
The practical benefit for compliance managers is significant: less time spent on repetitive admin, fewer things falling through the cracks, and a much stronger audit position.
Easy access to policies
An audit-ready policy system must provide employees with easy access to policies so they can be found and accessed at the point of need without difficulty or barriers. Strong user adoption is at the centre of any effective policy management tool. A product like Xoralia does this through:
- A central policy library that is easy to access.
- Single sign-on (SSO) and seamless integration with Microsoft 365 and Teams.
- Powerful search facility and the ability to browse using custom filters, with an AI-powered bot that can answer employee questions about policies directly.
- Personalised views tailored for different groups - admins, policy owners and users.
- Configurable web parts covering different scenarios to embed polices into SharePoint sites or your SharePoint intranet.
Employee attestation and mandatory reads
Employee attestation remains the best way to demonstrate that employees have read and agreed with policies and any related updates, particularly those that are mandatory. Reporting then can show the level of compliance across your organisation. Audit-ready policy software supports employee attestation with an out-of-the-box feature to enable employees to confirm they have read a policy, similar to a digital signature.
Critically, this replaces the time-consuming manual process of chasing confirmations and logging responses, and gives you defensible, timestamped evidence that will hold up under audit scrutiny.
Compliance reporting
Ultimately, you need to have easy, comprehensive reporting in place to demonstrate compliance with employee attestation, mandatory reads, policy updates, and so on. Xoralia even offers custom quizzes and e-learning to demonstrate that employees understand policies and policy updates.
Real-time dashboards give you an at-a-glance view of completion rates and outstanding actions across the organisation, so you always know exactly where things stand.
Audit trails and security
An audit-ready policy system must be fully secure, but also be able to tick various boxes if it comes under scrutiny through the audit process itself, with:
- In-built audit trails and compliance logs.
- Granular access control for admins, but also to define responsibilities for each policy.
- Robust version control to reduce the chance of multiple versions of policies circulating.
- The ability to enforce templates for different types of policies.
- Custom workflows to ensure new policies or updates involve the right stakeholders and experts.
Flexible workflows
Ready for your audit? That requires your actual policies always to be up to date and actively managed, and for you to be able to demonstrate this. An audit-ready policy management system will have in-built publication, review, and approval workflows for policy owners and reviewers, which can be configured at the individual policy level if required. Xoralia customers tell us that these workflows are essential for keeping policies up to date.
The outcome is that you can walk into any audit confident that your policies reflect the current regulatory position, without having scrambled to update them at the last minute.
Reporting for management
An audit-ready system doesn’t just help you manage the compliance process internally. It also equips you to report upward with confidence. Compliance managers increasingly need to produce board-level reports and risk summaries that demonstrate the organisation’s compliance position to senior leaders and executives.
An audit-ready policy system makes this straightforward, providing ready-made data and reporting outputs that translate policy management activity into clear, credible evidence of compliance health, without hours of manual data collection beforehand.
The benefits of being audit-ready
Being audit-ready has multiple benefits.
Support the compliance process and reduce risk
Ultimately, being audit-ready ensures that the compliance process is no longer a tightrope walk. You have comprehensive and convincing evidence that policies and any relevant updates are being understood by employees, and the smoother process reduces the risk of errors or omissions. Audit trails and compliance logs are also fully covered.
Reduce admin overhead
Xoralia automates and removes almost all of the tedious manual effort associated with employee attestation, compliance reporting and getting policy owners to update their policies. This significantly reduces effort levels, saves time, and lowers costs. When you are audit-ready, it also means you don’t have to repeat the process each time an audit comes around.
Do more with less
An audit-ready policy system should save you and your team many hours. This allows you better to meet the challenges of the more complex regulatory landscape and achieve more without increasing your budget.
Add more value
As a compliance professional, you didn’t work hard only to end up spending the day sending nudge emails and logging responses in a spreadsheet. An audit-ready system automates most of this drudgery, providing an opportunity to add more value and contribute your expertise to reduce risk and create value.
Remove the stress for your team and your stakeholders
The combination of reduced risk, better preparation for the audit and no more mad scrambles removes much of the stress associated with the audit process.
Move towards a culture of compliance
An investment in a system like Xoralia demonstrates a step up in efficiency and a commitment to compliance. It can be a statement that indicates your organisation takes compliance seriously now and helps your business move towards a more compliant culture.
The power of audit-ready policy management
When you’re audit-ready, you’re in a position of strength and back in control of policy management. A solution like Xoralia is essential to achieving audit readiness and positioning your compliance function as a modern, automation-led operation rather than a reactive, manual one.
If you want to see what an audit-ready policy system looks like in action, then book a free Xoralia demo.
Frequently asked questions
What is an audit-ready policy solution?
What are the main elements of an audit-ready policy management solution?
What are the benefits of being audit-ready?
About the author
Dan Hawtrey
CEO and product lead
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.