A fundamental pillar of successful policy management is to put measures in place to ensure that policies are acted upon by your employees. Employee attestation on your policies and procedures is a popular way to ensure your policy documents are being read and understood. It’s a relatively simple idea and straightforward process, but executing it successfully can be difficult.
In this article we’re going to look at employee attestation, what it is, why it is important, how to measure it, and how policy management software can help support it.
What is policy attestation?
Attestation for your policies is sometimes known as employee attestation, policy attestation or document attestation. It is a process by which employees confirm that they have read and understood your policies and procedures, and any changes to these policies.
At its simplest, policy attestation asks employees to confirm that they have read and understood a policy by checking a box or even electronically signing a policy. More sophisticated digital policy attestation/acknowledgement solution like Xoralia also offer additional quizzes and learning options to test to see if the policy has actually been understood by employees. Attestation can then be measured to track policy success for both compliance and business reasons, with reporting on the detail of who has completed the process in order to increase the numbers.
Why do you need policy attestation?
There are several reasons why it is very important to acquire attestation for your policies.
- Ensure policies are read and understood
- Policies are critical and help ensure employees follow the right rules to stay safe, compliant, efficient and more. Employee attestation is a major way to ensure that policies are actually being read, understood and followed by employees.
- Demonstrate compliance
- There are many legal and regulatory areas that require compliance. Third-party regulators and related certification bodies, as well as insurers, will expect there to be a mechanism to ensure employees are trained and updated on compliance-related matters. Policy attestation is an excellent way to show external regulators that this is the case and also demonstrate particular policies have been disseminated to the workforce.
- Change management
- Policy attestation can be an important ingredient in change management efforts, for example in introducing new ways of working, changes to procedures and more, particularly if a change needs to be rolled out quickly and you need to ensure it has reached all sections of your workforce. Again, attestation is an effective way to communicate new policies and changes to policies.
- Employee onboarding
- The employee onboarding process usually requires new starters to get up to speed quickly with processes and procedures. Employee attestation is a useful component of any employee onboarding process and ensures that nothing gets missed.
- Policy management insights
- Policy attestation gives you powerful data into how effective your policies are with insights into which policies are more easily understood, whether there are particular issues with understanding a certain policy or a section of it, and how different groups within your organisation are responding to policies.
- Valuable trend data allows you to make adjustments and interventions to individual policies and the way they are managed, to improve overall policy effectiveness.
How can you measure policy management effectiveness?
There are various ways to measure policy management effectiveness, much of it being achieved through the employee attestation process. Useful measures both at the organisational and department level include:
- The proportion of policies being read via attestation confirmation.
- The proportion of policies being truly understood via additional quiz and learning challenges.
- The speed to which the attestation process is being completed and understood.
- Areas of policies that are not being fully understood, for example via responses to individual questions in any policy quiz questions.
- The proportion of policies being updated and reviewed by policy holders (not related to employee attestation but very useful!).
Challenges of acquiring attestation and how policy management software helps
Acquiring attestation for policies has its challenges. Policy management software is designed to help overcome many of these, doing much of the heavy lifting around the attestation process.
- Ticking the box
- One key problem with attestation is that it can just end up literally being a box-ticking exercise with employees simply stating they have read and understood a policy, when they have actually done neither. While strictly speaking this may be acceptable from a compliance angle, it actually undermines the effectiveness of your policies. Policy management software like Xoralia can help by adding additional features, including using custom quizzes to actually test employees on the contents of the policy, or integrating a digital sign feature to emphasise the validity of the attestation.
Attestation features in Xoralia
Xoralia is an advanced policy management software solution that includes a number of key features that support employee attestation.
- Easy attestation
- The easy attestation feature allows employees to preview and read a policy and then tick a box to confirm that they have read the document. Additionally, a quiz can be set to test the user’s knowledge of the policy to ensure it has been properly understood.
- Quiz builder
- The quiz builder allows content and policy owners to set their own questions for users about a policy. They can create custom questions, select from a pool of set questions and also set their own pass mark, all from an intuitive interface.
- Reporting dashboard
- Xoralia’s dashboard provides all the reporting that policy owners and central compliance teams need to track and drive the attestation process. It provides a breakdown of policy readership and attestation status, presenting an overall score of documents read and the average quiz score. It then allows you to break this down for each policy and by salient groups such as department, not only helping to drive compliance but also providing evidence to show to external third parties that employees are reading and understanding a new policy.
Need to support the attestation process? Get in touch!
Document or employee attestation is essential in ensuring there is effective communication and compliance relating to your policies. If you’d like to discuss how policy management software like Xoralia can support attestation then get in touch or even book a free 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
Xoralia drives user engagement and compliance...
The platform's user attestation functionality has been particularly impactful, leading to a remarkable increase from ~50% to 86% in user attestation within a matter of weeks.
Rian Stuart, IT Manager, Twinstream
...simplifies our policy management...
It not only simplifies our policy management, but also enhances our overall compliance posture and has proven to be a significant time-saver for our organization.
Nadja Friedrichs, Vice President of HR, Boyum IT
...single source of truth and access for employees...
We successfully rolled out the tool with a minimal internal learning curve and achieved a 97% read / acknowledgement rate on our first assigned policy.