Policy and procedure management is an important activity that helps to minimise risk, support smooth operations, underpin compliance, support decision-making and allows employees to get things done. But the level to which an organisation actively carries out policy and procedure management can vary dramatically, not only from business to business, but across different departments and teams within the same organisation too.
The vast majority of organisations have policies and procedures that describe the “official” view and way of doing things. If there a central, standard and optimised way that these policies and procedures are updated, stored, accessed and reported upon, then it means that policy and procedure management practices are in place.
If the approach is less formalised, uncertain and there are numerous challenges in accessing policies such as there being multiple versions in circulation, then it means policy management is less likely to be practices.
In this post we’re going to explore what policy and procedure management is, why it is important and what exactly is involved. We’ll also touch upon the role that software can play.
What is a policy and procedure?
A policy can be considered to be a document or artefact that states an official position or set of rules relating to a particular topic that need to be referred to and followed by employees. A procedure is a similar “official” set of how to do things – any step or steps that need to be followed in response to complete a particular objective or in response to a particular event.
Within an organisation, policies and procedures need to be followed by employees and are usually available in the form of controlled documents. There may also be related documentation that is also controlled, for example accompanying guidelines or “how to” manuals.
What is policy and procedure management?
Policy and procedure management can be considered to be the active management of policy and procedure documentation within an organisation to ensure that policies and procedures are:
- Up to date and accurate all the way through their lifecycle.
- Are housed in an appropriate repository.
- Can be found and accessed by the people who need to read them, at the point of need.
- Are followed by employees to minimise risk and ensure compliance, with employees aware of any changes made.
- Are reported on to meet any compliance requirements
- And more.
Why is policy and procedure management important?
Actively managing your policies and procedures is critical and has lots of benefits.
- Minimises risks
- When employees don’t follow particular policies there can be negative consequences with potential levels of risk. Sometimes these risks are not particularly serious, but in some areas such as health and safety, compliance is critical. Actively managing your policies so they are adhered by your employees will help to minimise risks across a wide number of areas from cybersecurity through to reputational management.
- Protects employees
- Policies and procedures are essential in protecting employees in a number of different ways – establishing health and safety, supporting safeguarding and ensuring employees treat each other with respect, and also protecting employees from accidentally taking actions which could jeopardise their employment or the safety of others.
- Supports operational efficiency
- Policies and procedures usually encourage employees to work in ways that also support efficiency and drive productivity. When everybody adopts these, it can really drive operational efficiency at scale.
- Supports onboarding
- Employees need to get themselves up to speed when they first join a company and this invariably means reading and understanding some key policies, some covered in what is effectively the “employee handbook.” Some policies also need to be read for compliance purposes. Effective policy and procedure management means that you are able to control the policies that new employees read, integrate them into an efficient onboarding process that doesn’t overwhelm, and then report on these too.
- Drives compliance
- Many policies and procedures relate to critical areas of regulatory and legal compliance, for example health and safety, data privacy, professional standards and more. Policy management increases the chance of people following your critical policies and driving compliance. More specifically, mandatory reads and employee attestation further drive levels of compliance and underpins related reporting.
- Underpins adoption in the digital workplace
- Policies and procedures in some areas will proscribe the use of particular digital workplace tools and applications. Having policies in place can support good digital workplace adoption. There are usually policies around terms of usage too.
- Helps everyone get things done
- While some policies and procedures are primarily concerned with compliance and risk, others are more operational such as an Expenses policy or your Travel policy. When employees can easily access these and they provide clarity on processes, it can help employees get things done quickly and effectively so they can get on with their working day.
- Drives standardisation
- All too often large organisations with multiple locations, countries, divisions and departments, often have fragmented processes and different ways of doing things. This can be inefficient and also risky, and organisations are often keen to introduce standardisation, particularly where a business has been built up through acquisition. Having clear documented policies and procedures that everybody can access is an important starting point for standardisation, ensuring everybody has clarity and is working on the same page. This has proved critical in merged organisatins.
What happens when policy management isn’t in place?
When policy and procedure management practices aren’t in place, then there can be various negative consequences:
- Employees find it difficult to find the policies they need at the right time.
- Multiple versions of policies end up being in circulation and nobody knows quite what the right version is.
- People end up emailing different teams or asking colleagues to get policies, which is highly inefficient.
- Policies simply don’t get updated.
- Teams have to rely on time-consuming manual processes to monitor onboarding and compliance processes relating to reading policies.
The main consequence is that people simply don’t follow policies and procedures or take them seriously with all the associated risks that follow.
What’s involved in policy and procedure management through the lifecycle?
There are multiple elements involved in policy management through the lifecycle of a policy, from the moment it is created, to the point that policy is withdrawn or replaced. Some of the different stages include:
- Creation: processes around the creation of the policies, including when they should be crated and who by.
- Storage and dissemination: finding the right solution that acts as a repository for policies and procedures so documents can easily be accessed by employees at the point of need.
- Findability and discoverability: making your policies and procedures findable and discoverable through search, browsing and embedding them within processes such as onboarding.
- Reviews and updating: carrying our reviews of policies and procedures so they continue to be accurate and up-to-date.
- Communication and change: communicating policies and changes in policies to employees to change and influence behaviours accordingly.
- Compliance and reporting: meeting any legal, regulatory and compliance requirements through employee attestation processes (mandatory reads) and associated reporting.
- Governance: establishing clear governance on all the above including ownership of individual policies and procedures to make sure everything happens.
The role that policy management software can play
Policy management software like Xoralia can make all the difference in supporting policy and procedure management in each of the area mentioned above, by partly automating the process and hugely reducing manual effort. For example:
- Creation: establishing clear ownership and roles for each single policy, as well as approval workflow to help support the creation of new polices.
- Storage and dissemination: establishing a trusted, central policy library that all employees can access.
- Findability and discoverability: adding a powerful search layer across your policies as well as browsing options, leveraging custom tags and categories.
- Reviews and updating: sending out review reminders to policy owners, establishing approval workflow for the replacement, and adding version control to replace a policy once there is a new version.
- Communication and change: helps you to communicate new and updated policies through personalisation, dashboard views, notifications and the employee attestation process.
- Compliance and reporting: facilitates mandatory reads, the employee attestation process and adds granular reporting. Xoralia even adds custom quizzes to test to see if employees have really understood the change.
- Governance: allowing you to hard-bake different aspects of governance into how you manage your policy library.
Overall if you are attempting to introduce policy and procedure management into your organisation, then a policy management solution like Xoralia will make a huge difference. Why not organise a free demo?
How policy management software can help
We think the best place to store your policies is inside SharePoint. Most companies already have SharePoint as part of their Microsoft 365 subscription. Using SharePoint means you have full control of your policies, and many best practices can be achieved right out of the box. However, there are gaps and certain best practices are hard to achieve.
To fill these gaps, and for best results we recommend using purpose-built policy management software for SharePoint and Microsoft 365.
We’ve developed a dedicated solution called Xoralia (pronounced Zor-ra-lee-a) that will ensure you have the best overall approach to policy management, supporting your users, policy owners and administrators.
We learned all about policy management from many years of building custom solutions for our clients on SharePoint. But we kept coming up against the same challenges, mostly caused by feature gaps in SharePoint. One day, a client asked us to build a policy management tool that filled these gaps. The trouble was, they didn’t have a lot of budget. But we had a good relationship with them and so we decided to collaborate on it provided we got to keep the code. Looking back, it was a pretty simple tool but over the years we have added more features and relaunched it. We’re now on version 3 and our original customer is still using it!
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.
