6 essential features of HR policy management software
- Dan Hawtrey
Every organisation has HR policies and procedures which must be kept up to date, easily accessible, targeted to the right people and support any compliance requirements.
On the surface, this sounds like it should be quite straightforward. However, the truth is that often HR teams struggle to keeping policies up to date and ensure they can easily be found and accessed by all employees. Various challenges, from version control to targeting the right policies to the right people, to tracking the reads of mandatory policies, all add layers of complexity and effort.
Investing in HR policy management software can make all the difference, doing most of the heavy lifting, applying automation, standardising your approach and more, to help overcome challenges and barriers.
In this article we’re going to explore HR policy management solutions in more detail. We look at why HR policy management is critical and then some of the common challenges faced by teams. We then cover six of the must-have features of an effective HR policy management solution and how these help HR teams to save time, ensure policies are current, easily findable and accessible for employees, and meet compliance requirements.
Why are HR policies critical?
Having clear and robust HR policies in place is essential in order to:
Support key people-related processes
HR policies ensure that major people-related processes run smoothly and effectively in areas such as pay and benefits, recruitment, talent management, and learning.
Onboard employees
Policies are particularly important to get new employees up to speed and ensure they are familiar with core people-related processes, professional standards and more.
Minimise risks
Various HR processes need to be carried out in ways that are legal and compliant, and these can vary across countries; HR policies help guide both managers and employees to make the right decisions and take effective steps that minimise risk.
Support an Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
HR policies underpin areas such as working practices, internal opportunities for growth, benefits and more – all factors in employee experience and developing and maintaining an EVP which supports talent retention and attraction.
Safeguard employees
Employers have a duty of care to their employees and HR policies set professional standards, provide clarity on unacceptable behaviour and ensure there is effective safeguarding in place.
Establish working patterns
HR policies underpin working patterns, including areas such as remote, hybrid and flexible work.
What are some of the key challenges around HR policy management?
There are a number of key challenges associated with HR policy management, including:
Findability & access
Ensuring that employees can easily find HR policies at the point they actually need them, and then successfully access them.
Engagement & reporting
Getting employees to read HR policies and procedures and any subsequent updates and then being confident that they have actually read and understood them.
Administration
Having the time to actually distribute and update policies and ensure they have been read, which when done manually is extremely time-consuming and tedious.
Onboarding
Integrating HR policies and procedures into your employee onboarding process, so they are reviewed when a new employee starts.
Version control
Having more than one version of an HR policy in circulation, leading to employees referencing versions that are now out of date.
Targeting
Ensuring that employees at a particular country, location or division are accessing the right HR policy in larger or global companies when there are variations in the policies and the systems used.
Creating & reviewing
Ensuring policies are created with input and/or approval from the necessary stakeholders, and also regularly reviewed to ensure they are up to date – this is not easy for maxxed-out HR leaders and their teams, especially when policies have to be updated at different times across countries and divisions.
Compliance
Ensuring any audit trails are in place and any associated reporting relating to HR policies meets compliance requirements, particularly in regulated and sensitive sectors.
The power of HR policy management software: six essential features
Roust HR policy management software has features that help HR teams to overcome many of these challenges. A policy management solution like Xoralia will do much of the heavy lifting associated with policy management. Here are six must-have features that a solution needs to be effective.
User friendly interface for all users
HR policies and procedures impact everybody in your organisation. It is essential that each individual employee should have easy and effortless access to be able to find and read an HR policy that is relevant to them. Any solution must have a user-friendly and intuitive interface to enable instant access, requiring no training or explaining. Ideally, the interfaces for administrators and policy owners should also be as easy to use in order to drive adoption.
When we designed Xoralia, we deliberately set out to create a product that was incredibly easy to use. Too many governance and compliance-related products have a poor user experience and are designed more for the compliance team rather than the average employee; we wanted to buck this trend by making our solution the easiest to use on the market. One way we have achieved this is by using an interface that is based on Microsoft 365 and SharePoint so instantly feels familiar to users.
Policy lifecycle management and workflow
There are several specific challenges around creating HR policies and then keeping them up to date:
- Ensuring policies are regularly updated or reviewed and dates do not get missed which can happen with very busy HR teams.
- Ensuring all the right people are involved in reviewing and approving policies and having absolute clarity on who should be involved when.
- Applying and standardising the workflow to avoid bottlenecks and steps so they don’t get missed.
- Ensuring HR policies are in the right template and have the right workflow applied when created.
- Potentially making this happen at scale across multiple locations or complex organisational structures.
A robust HR policy management solution like Xoralia ticks the boxes on all of the above. Every policy can have a set owner or owners, and then you can also define a custom review and approval workflow for a new policy or its regular review, providing clarity on exactly who is involved and how.
Regular review dates can also be applied, with automatic notifications and personalised views within the tool so everyone is clear of what they need to do and when. You can also define specific templates in Word that need to be used for particular policies.
The powerful combination of custom workflows for each policy, templates, notifications, personalised views and automation takes much of the pain and effort out of policy lifecycle management, ensuring your HR policies are up to date and have been robustly reviewed to minimise risk.
Easy employee attestation and acknowledgement
Employee onboarding will usually require new starters to digest elements of the HR handbook and other key policies, and you may need them to confirm that they agree to these. Sometimes you may also need to roll out a new HR policy and ensure all employees have read it. However, getting everyone to read a policy and keep tracking who has actually read it is a very time-consuming task, particularly when you are using email and spreadsheets.
Policy management software such as Xoralia that includes an employee attestation feature can do all the heavy lifting and eliminate the associated manual admin that HR teams simply don’t have time for. Employee attestation works by having an automatic flag on a policy where an employee has to confirm they have read and understood the policy. Granular reporting tracks success while automatic notifications to those who have yet to attest increases the numbers reading the policy. This is a highly effective and tried and tested way to ensure new starters and employees are reading and digesting key HR policies.
Reporting & analytics plus being audit-ready
One of the most powerful elements of a solution like Xoralia is the reporting within the employee attestation features which can demonstrate to regulatory bodies or certification third parties that HR policies are being read and understood by the majority of employees. Figures can also be broken down by group or team to drive compliance. Because Xoralia integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365, it also means analytics can easily feed into Power BI reports which might include other compliance or HR-related numbers.
A robust HR solution should also have audit trails built in, in order to support compliance, particularly in regulated industries. The approval workflow in place for policy creation and review is also often noted by regulatory or certification bodies.
Targeted policy distribution by role or group
In global, large or complex businesses HR policies can vary from location to location, or across different divisions. This might be because there are different legal requirements across different countries, or perhaps there are different HR solutions in place – a common scenario in businesses that have been built up by acquisition and have yet to consolidate HR platforms.
HR policies can also vary from role to role. You may also have different contractual arrangements for different types of employees, and different policies may also apply to managers, for example. New starters will also have specific HR policies they need to digest and probably agree to when they first start.
When you do have a diverse workforce, an effective HR policy solution must be able to target the right HR policies to the right groups, to support compliance and operations, reflecting location, role variations, contractual arrangements, level of hierarchy, length of tenure and more.
A product like Xoralia which integrates completely with Microsoft 365 makes targeting policies to different groups across your workforce very easy because you can use the Microsoft 365 groups that are likely already in place or create new groups from scratch.
AI-powered search
Global and complex organisations can end up having a plethora of people-focused policies, as well as a range of other related policies, procedures and guidelines. One of the major frustrations for any employee is not being able to find the policy instantly at the time they actually need it – and invariably if they can’t, they give up.
Having a robust, AI-powered search that allows users to find any policy they need can make all the difference and help ensure that policies actually get used. Strong findability and successfully searching is built into a product like Xoralia which combines the power of AI, Microsoft Search, custom metadata and more so an employee can quickly find the relevant policy they need. With a product like Xoralia are also options for employees who prefer browsing to find the right document.
HR policy management software that just works
If your HR team has problems managing their policies, then a solution like Xoralia will almost certainly help. Why not organise a free demo to see how it can help your HR team?
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
Tim Galer
IT Coordinator
Hughes
Ideal partner for our regulated environment
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
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Central policy library
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Search and filter tools
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Mandatory read policies with attestations
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Quizzes
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Notifications and alerts
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Employee dashboard
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Line manager dashboard
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Works on mobile, in Teams and SharePoint
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New policy creation workflows
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Policy update workflows
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Review and approval gates
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Policy version history
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Compliance dashboard
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Audit trail
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Full reporting
And last but not least:
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Professional implementation service and support
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Evergreen software – frequent updates and improvements
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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
Rian Stuart
IT Manager
TwinStream
