How automated policy management benefits your business
- Dan Hawtrey
Policy management is an important area for many organisations, particularly those in highly regulated industries. It reduces risk, enables decision making, ensures you have robust reporting processes in place, drives efficiency, reduces accidents and more. It also helps maintain accountability and makes it easier to demonstrate compliance during internal or external audits.
Employees need to have easy access to policies, be able to find what they need quickly and easily, and understand when there have been changes. This is even more important in hybrid and remote working environments. Meanwhile, policy owners need to keep their policies up to date, be confident that changes have been understood, and sometimes report on this for compliance purposes.
All of the above might sound straightforward, but it can take a lot of coordination and effort, particularly when everyone is extremely busy. It only takes one out-of-date policy in circulation to create risks with a range of potential negative outcomes. Understandably, many organisations decide to invest in automated policy management solutions like Xoralia that help them to establish a central policy library, carry out employee attestation processes, support policy owners to manage their content and more, while significantly reducing the effort and time taken.
Xoralia integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, allowing policy owners to manage content where they already work, while ensuring employees always see the latest approved version. An essential key feature of a solution like Xoralia is its automation, which saves both huge amounts of time and ensures that policy owners don’t forget to carry out aspects of policy management. In this post we’re going to explore why automation is so important in policy management, and how it benefits a business.
Problems with traditional policy management
One of the problems with traditional policy management is that is has tended to be carried out manually, usually using email and spreadsheets. For example, a central compliance or policy team might have to:
- Email policy owners to remind them to update or review a policy.
- Use email to ask individuals to confirm they have read and understood a policy (“employee attestation”), and then send follow-up emails until they have confirmed they have done so, or send these via managers.
- Use a spreadsheet to monitor compliance reporting relating to an employee attestation process.
- Use email and spreadsheets to monitor compliance reporting and employee attestation around policies for new starters, which may differ from group to group.
- Maintain separate tracking for each department or location, increasing the risk of fragmented oversight and missing records.
As anyone who has used email and spreadsheets for policy management, employee attestation and compliance reporting, they can confirm that it is a significant undertaking and administrative burden that:
- wastes huge amounts of time which could be spent on more value-added activities.
- is highly inefficient and prone to errors, with areas being missed.
- significantly increases the risk of policies going out of date or more than version of a policy being in circulation.
- makes it harder to complete an employee attestation process and successfully report on it.
- is extremely frustrating and tedious for the teams involved.
- leads to less targeted efforts around policy management and attestation – for example aimed at specific groups within the organisation – as they are simply too difficult and time-consuming to manage.
- weakens the ability of central compliance and policy teams to influence distributed policy owners.
- leads to inconsistent approaches to policy management across an organisation.
- undermines the creation of reliable audit trails, making it difficult to demonstrate compliance during internal reviews or external audits.
- limits visibility of real-time policy engagement data, preventing early detection of non-compliance or low-readership trends.
The advantages of using an automated policy management system
The digital workplace provides huge opportunities to automate workflows and basic, repetitive tasks. Workflow engines such as Power Automate and Nintex are evolving as “low code no code” platforms that mean even non-IT professionals can create simple automation. Specific products including policy management solutions like Xoralia are also embracing automation.
Policy management is an area where there are multiple opportunities for automation, with several advantages.
Saving time
- Policy management involves multiple repetitive tasks that are very time-consuming. Chasing up on employee attestation processes. Reminding policy owners to update their policies. Notifying new starters about the policies they must read. All these can be automated, saving huge amounts of time for administrators who can then focus their efforts on more valuable and less tedious tasks. You can use the Xoralia value benefits calculator to estimate how much time and cost your organisation could save by automating these processes.
Reducing errors
- When everything is done manually, it leads to errors. People get missed and don’t have access to the right policy. Employee attestation processes aren’t complete. A policy doesn’t get updated. When you use automation, it reduces the chance of these simple but potentially damaging errors.
Standardising processes
- Bringing automation to policy management helps standardise processes across different policy owners who might sit in different functions. It helps to bring a more robust approach to keeping policies up to date.
Completing the gaps for compliance and certification
- As automation brings a more reliable and through approach to employee attestation processes it can provide better reporting for compliance and certification purposes, not only in the actual report, but also if you are letting a third-party regulator or certification body about how you approach employee attestation.
Overall, using an automated policy management system brings significant benefits. It removes much of the administrative burden, reduces the risks associated with manual tasks, and ensures that policy owners, compliance teams and employees follow a consistent, structured approach.
It also provides greater visibility into who has read what, when, and how often – helping organisations respond faster to audits, internal reviews or emerging compliance risks.
Automation makes it easier to scale your policy processes across teams, departments and regions, supporting growth while maintaining control.
Automating policy management in Xoralia
Xoralia is built on SharePoint and Microsoft 365 with built-in automation that eliminates the need for manual follow‑ups, reminders or spreadsheets. It streamlines the entire policy lifecycle – covering creation or upload, review and approval, version control, assignment, attestation, tracking, reminders, expiry and reporting. Xoralia also integrates with Microsoft Teams, letting employees receive notifications and complete attestation tasks without leaving the flow of work.
Automation in Xoralia covers multiple areas, including assignment based on dynamic Microsoft 365 group targeting; recurring re‑acknowledgement cycles; automatic reminders (via email and Teams) and escalation; scheduled policy reviews and expiry alerts; quiz‑based or simple digital attestations; and real‑time dashboards and audit reporting for compliance teams.
Want to automate aspects of policy management? Arrange a Xoralia demo!
Automation brings efficiency and accuracy to policy management. Xoralia is a policy management solution that uses automation to deliver value.
If there are aspects of managing your policies that could be automated, then why not arrange a free Xoralia demo?
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
How to get started with Xoralia
Step 1: request a demo
Fill out our form and we will be in touch to arrange a time. You can even book a time yourself.
Step 2: get a price proposal
If you think Xoralia is for you ask us for a quote. This will set out any options you may have.
Step 3: install and launch
We’ll install Xoralia in your environment (or you can do it yourself). We’ll provide training and support to get you up and running quickly.
Here's what you'll get
-
Central policy library
-
Search and filter tools
-
Mandatory read policies with attestations
-
Quizzes
-
Notifications and alerts
-
Employee dashboard
-
Line manager dashboard
-
Works on mobile, in Teams and SharePoint
-
New policy creation workflows
-
Policy update workflows
-
Review and approval gates
-
Policy version history
-
Compliance dashboard
-
Audit trail
-
Full reporting
And last but not least:
-
Professional implementation service and support
-
Evergreen software – frequent updates and improvements
-
Comes with our "it just works" support warranty – we’ll fix any bugs, often before you even notice
Ready to get started?
Connect with us to streamline your policy management and ensure effortless compliance.
AppSource review
Uniting excellence in integration and features for seamless policy management
As the newly appointed IT Manager at our company, I was tasked with implementing the Xoralia policy management tool, and the experience has been nothing short of impressive.
Rian Stuart
IT Manager
TwinStream
