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Policy management is the process of planning, creating, approving, communicating, updating, tracking, and implementing policies and standard operating procedures in an organization. It encompasses all phases of the policy and procedure life cycle. Modern policy management, however, goes a step further, ensuring that the policy and procedure content itself is purposely designed to drive desired outcomes.
Policies guide individuals within an organization on expected behaviors and decision-making processes. Policies do not provide specific steps; rather, they serve as overarching guidelines that inform employees how to choose the right course of action and acceptable behavior of employees. These guidelines ensure consistency, promote compliance with legal and regulatory requirements, encourage operational efficiency, and align employee actions with the organization's values and business goals.
In short, policies are meant to drive the right decisions and behavior.
Keep reading to learn more about the five key elements of policy and procedure management and the benefits of using policy management software to streamline the process within your organization.
How is Policy Management Different from Document Management?
General-purpose document management (DMS) or content management (CMS) systems handle all types of important documents. This might include contracts, reports, engineering specifications, and more. Many are extremely powerful, but they aren’t designed to handle the unique challenges and nuances of policies and procedures.
Consider this: policies and procedures provide little value unless they are used and followed.
With traditional document management, there is little consideration for the content itself and that people are using it. It’s what’s inside those documents that drives performance and compliance.
Many people equate policies and procedures with document control. Or simply storing documents in a central repository. Certainly, management and document control are critical, but it's only part of the puzzle. Some still view policies and procedures only as a necessary evil, required only to pass an audit. When the team is focused only on getting them done, they lose sight of the business or economic outcome.
Policy management goes beyond traditional document management, including an implementation phase. It prioritizes the content itself; how the content is created, its quality, standardization, and most importantly, ensuring that people can use it to perform their jobs and achieve the desired outcomes.
We’ve seen firsthand how when people have shifted their thinking just a bit – focusing on the users’ needs and the desired performance – the impact is significant: serious mishaps avoided, improved compliance, increased profitability, auditor confidence, and more.
6 Key Elements of Effective Policy Management
Policies are the backbone of any organization – so the management of these guidelines and standards is vital. The importance of policy management cannot be overstated. It makes an impact on business operations, regulatory compliance, and risk management. There are six essential ingredients to an effective policy management program.
1. Policy Content Clarity
Policy content planning and creation sets the stage for everything else.
The actual mechanics of writing policy documents are not particularly difficult. The biggest problem we see is vagueness – policies that are too general or worded in such a way that they are subject to interpretation. What most people struggle with the most is figuring out what policies they should have and what they should cover.
Policy documentation serves as a reference point for employees to understand the expectations within your organization. Make sure that during policy development that new policies are written clearly and concisely so that any employee who opens the document has a full understanding of what it means.
Policies should include:
- All policy provisions
- Any exceptions that may come up
- Potential risks of ignoring a policy
- Links to related procedures
- Examples, if necessary
As a best practice, all policies in your organization should follow a standardized template and formatting. When policy content is presented in a consistent way, employees know what to expect. It is easier for your employees and reviewers to comprehend the information. Well thought-out content, presented in a consistent manner, also makes auditors happy and bolsters their confidence in you. Audits are easier and less costly.
Zavanta, our policy management solution, has a built-in structure that makes simple, consistent policy creation as easy as filling out a form. The system enforces a standardized format so that all policies look the same.
Note: You might also find our guide helpful, “How to Write a Standard Operating Procedure.”
2. Policies Linked to Procedures
Achieving business objectives requires having both policies and procedures accessible to employees. Most regulations require both.
Creating policies by themselves is a good start, but it’s equivalent to saying something like, “it is our policy to be an equal opportunity employer." That’s it. It’s then up to the employees to figure out how to make that happen on their own. This is risky and can often be disastrous.
If your work procedures aren’t captured and cross-checked with stated policies, your organization will at best be out of sync with itself, and at worst, be noncompliant with legal, regulatory, or internal controls.
Although the management process for policies and procedures is not different, the content in them is quite different. Many people do not understand the distinction, which leads to common mistakes, such as mixing policies and procedures in the same document, and more. The result is confusion, lengthy review cycles, documents that are not utilized, and ongoing maintenance headaches.
To put things simply: a procedure is a task, while a policy is a guideline in which decisions are made. The best practice is to break each policy and each procedure into its own document and link them together. To learn more about the intricacies between each, check out our blog "Difference Between Policy, Procedure, Work Instructions."
Policies and procedures should not be mixed together or even included as separate sections in the same document.
3. Review and Approval Workflow
Once organizational policies and procedures are created, it’s time to have them reviewed and approved. All relevant stakeholders should have time to make any updates to the policies and be sure that all required information is included. By establishing a structured approval workflow, policies and procedures are confirmed to be complete and ready to distribute across teams.
Since many policies cover high-level topics and standards, the C-suite and upper management are more likely to have a larger say in what the policies consist of. However, it’s important to get opinions from all levels of employees within your organization. Since policies affect everyone, a range of perspectives could positively contribute to this process and encourage successful implementation.
4. Accessibility of Policies
It’s one thing to have policies and procedures for your organization created, but it’s another to ensure that they are easily accessible to those who need to follow them. Accessibility means operational documents are easy to find, available in whatever format employees need (paper or online), and the content is clearly understood by the reader.
While some organizations send out an email and call it a day, we recommend utilizing digital platforms and a central repository for policy communication.
A policy management solution like Zavanta includes features to make the policy and procedure communication and accessibility intuitive to your employees. Accessibility features include a message center that notifies employees of new or updated documentation, a built-in search engine, mobile application and a reader dashboard with a list of favorites. Content is organized the way employees need it (by different departments, divisions, business processes etc.).
Bottom line: employees should be able to find the information they need at the moment they need it, and when they find it, they understand it and use it to take the right action.
5. Policy Compliance and Enforcement
Policies are created to ensure employees are adhering to your organization’s goals and values – so their usage must be enforced. Policy compliance is essential for preventing serious mishaps before they happen. To ensure compliance and enforcement of policies within your organization, we recommend employee attestation and regular audits.
Employee attestation is a process through which an employee confirms, often in writing, that they have read, understood, and agree to comply with a particular policy or procedure. This compliance program practice ensures that employees are aware of and acknowledge their responsibilities, an understanding of the policies that affect their day-to-day work, the significance of these policies, and how to implement them effectively.
Zavanta offers confirmed compliance through Read Verify campaigns, Checklists, and eSignatures. Some organizations automate employee attestation on a schedule. For example, they require that all employees read-verify their Code of Conduct Policy every January.
To assess policy usage, some industries may require external audits. Beyond these audits, we also recommend a compliance team or internal auditor conduct regular assessments of policies and procedures. Specialized policy management software often provides tools like an audit trail that make these assessments easier and more insightful.
So, employees have verified that they have read and understand your organization’s Code of Conduct Policy. How do you know for sure? You can test them. Many policy management systems include testing and quiz features. Because managers can view the results, it is easy to see where a policy or procedure might need further clarification.
Some policy management systems provide usage analytics that answer questions such as: which policy topics do employees search for the most? Which documents get the most visitors? These tools can also provide valuable insights into policy and procedure usage.
6. Continuous Improvement
Just because a policy or procedure is created doesn’t mean that the work is done. What many businesses tend to forget is that continuous improvement is an essential part of effective policy management.
It’s important to conduct regular reviews. If possible, use automation to put review reminders on a schedule. Obviously, when your business changes or regulations, your policies and business processes must be updated and distributed to employees as quickly as possible.
For example, if IT makes an update to the Employee Security policy, the policy manager needs to ensure this update is made in all relevant operational documentation to maintain compliance and the safety of the company’s data.
One way to enhance continuous improvement is to offer a feedback mechanism that allows employees to provide input on policy updates. Since employees use company policies frequently, it’s important to offer feedback forms or questionnaires to encourage engagement and empowerment and give employees a way to address any concerns or questions surrounding the presentation of policy language.
Benefits of Policy Management Software
Policy management can be overwhelming – but there is an easier way. Policy management tools and software solutions can significantly reduce the time staff spend on all policy management tasks and at the same time, ensure employees, reviewers, and auditors have access to content that is clear, complete, and well thought-out.
At Comprose, we have been in the business of effective policy management for over 30 years. We’ve productized our expertise in our software Zavanta so that you can leverage field-tested best practices to streamline policy management in your organization.
Benefits of using Zavanta includes:
- Enhanced Efficiency: Automation across all life cycle phases, reduces manual tasks and time spent by everyone involved.
- Improved Consistency: Zavanta’s structured approach to content creation ensures all policies and procedures contain essential information, presented in a consistent manner and format.
- Trusted Single Source of Truth: Provides an organized, centralized location employees know they can always go to and find answers; instant, easy access to all policy and procedure documents.
- Version Control: Ensures that all employees have access to the latest version and most current policies and procedures.
- Change Management at Scale: Updates across hundreds of documents can be made at one time.
- Improved Compliance Tracking: Monitors adherence to policies through reports and can shed insight into areas of non-compliance.
- Audit Readiness: Reduces audit prep time (our users report 50% cost reduction) and ensures audit success because auditors can easily see policies and procedures get used and that a solid document control system is in place.
- Policies Linked to Related Content: Policies can be linked to processes, procedures, regulations and even into other web-based applications.
- Streamlined Communication: Allows for efficient communication of policy changes and updates through integrated communication tools.
- Enhanced Accountability: Tracks employee attestation and understanding of policies and procedures through features like Read Verify and testing. Checklists ensure that each and every employee completes critical procedures correctly while providing auditable proof to supervisors.
- Security & Control: Ensures that sensitive documents are protected and that no one can make unauthorized changes or perform functions such as starting a new revision without the proper permissions.
- Analytics Visibility: Data about content usage, review progress, and other useful stats is represented in customizable dashboards.
- Enterprise Scalability: Handles the immense challenge mid and large size organizations have managing hundreds or thousands of policies and procedures as well as a large user base.
Note: If you are evaluating various software solutions, keep in mind that different vendors often describe their products differently, using these terms: Policy and Procedure Software, SOP Software, Work Instruction Software, Process Management, and Policy Management Software. Most are designed to manage documents that are created and then updated using MS Word or Google docs.
Make sure the software can address the information needs of employees and stakeholders at all levels of the organization and that it's not limited to a select few or a single application. Managers may only need the big picture (high-level processes), while others need to know what standard policy is (are we allowed to download software on our own?), and then some workers need the detailed step-by-step. Auditors want to see your quality manual.
Zavanta’s Difference: Structured Content
Policies and procedures have unique characteristics: high volume, fast-change, diverse audience. Uniformity is a must-have. The traditional document approach found in most policy management solutions lacks the needed quality controls and structure to meet these challenges, especially at scale. This is why Zavanta utilizes a structured content model for policy management.
Structured content is information that is broken up into small, standardized components. Unlike unstructured content that you find in static documents, like those created with MS Word, structured content is much easier to create, manage, translate, repurpose, track, and update. It's easy to control policy and procedure content quality and standardization.
Zavanta Was Purpose-Built for Effective Policy Management
Zavanta is an all-in-one software solution that streamlines the entire policies and procedure life cycle with unified governance and scalability. With Zavanta, you have a single system you can manage with, train from, and that regulators love. Discover how Zavanta can help improve the policy management process within your organization.
Reach out to our team today to learn more.
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