What is corporate policy management and why does it matter?
Know the best practices for policy and procedure management so your company stays compliant.
Policies and procedures are more than just suggestions at a work place. Corporate policies and their underlying procedures help businesses stay ethical, be compliant to laws and regulations, as well as protect the entire corporate enterprise from ambiguity in the face of legal action. Policies also help businesses establish a corporate culture and let employees know what’s expected of them.
That’s why having a set of policy management best practices is key. Corporate policy development is an important step in setting a foundation for your workplace culture.
Here are some effective policy management best practices to consider when creating your corporate policies.
Policy and Procedures Best Practices
- Policies should be managed by one person or one department within your organization.
- Policies need to exist in a digital format. Not only does this provide a centralized, accessible location for anyone who needs them, but having them in a non-print format also means they are more easily updated than a thick procedural book that needs to be reprinted and redistributed every time there’s a change.
- Policies have to be up to date. Corporations run into problems and potentially legal trouble when their policies are outdated. Having a regular review schedule is a key practice when working with corporate policies and procedures.
- Policy owners need to understand the policies they are in charge of. If policies relate to internet and cyber security, the owner of those policies should be a highly skilled and educated member of the IT team. If they relate to human resources, they should belong to a member of the human resources department.
- There needs to be a standard and understood way of monitoring for violations against policies. Employees need to understand what the policies are, where they can be found, and what the consequences are for violations.
- New policies need to be communicated organization-wide immediately and effectively.
Policy and Procedure Management Software
One policy management best practice is to make sure information is centralized and stored in a backed-up location, it makes sense that businesses would want to invest in a quality policy and procedure software to help handle this. Here are some software solutions to consider.
- PolicyHub: This solution gives businesses a straightforward solution for ng, updating, approving and communicating policies.
- PowerDMS: This software is a popular choice among businesses who have a large regulatory burden.
- PolicyTech: One of the acclaimed benefits of this cloud based software is not only the fact that there’s no need to install or update any programs internally, but also that the program is how efficient it is in moving policies through approval processes and how it reminds users when a policy is updated or needs to be edited.
- Convercent: Convercent works with many companies and is a leading provider of ethics and compliance cloud software.
No matter how you choose to manage your policies and procedures, the key things to remember are they are up to date, accessible to employees at all times, and help to keep your business in line and compliant with any regulations required of your organization.
