How Should a Policy Administrator Facilitate Policy Reviews?

Outdated policies tin leave your organisation at risk. Onetime policies may neglect to comply with new laws and regulations. They may not address new systems or technology, which can issue in inconsistent practices. Can you lot imagine a policy that still addresses whether you can bring in floppy disks from home or discusses the proper use of fax machines? Yet at that place are probably policy manuals out there that still have this information in them.

If you lot're not sure whether you need to review your policies and procedures, consider these statistics:

• 69% of exec u tives are not confident that their electric current policies are enough to see future needs.
• Only 27% of CCOs believe the compliance function has a change direction procedure in place to place changes in laws and regulations and to comprise those changes into their policies.
• 63% of organizations say their policy management plan helps reduce legal costs and resolution time of regulatory issues and fines.

Bottom line, regularly reviewing your policies and procedures keeps your system upwards to engagement with the latest regulations and engineering science, as well as consistent with the industry'south best practices. Your policies are more consistent and effective, and they help protect the arrangement, the employees, and the people you serve.

And if yous're in a high-risk or highly-regulated industry, such as healthcare, public safety, cyberbanking, or financial applied science, you should be conducting regular policy reviews anyway. However, it'south a smart idea for every arrangement, regardless of how regulated y'all are.

When to review policies and procedures

With everything yous have to exercise in the normal course of the workday, it'southward piece of cake for the policy review process to autumn through the cracks. Even your executives and administrators know it'due south important to review policies and procedures, but everything else all the same manages to steal their attention and energy.

But policy review is almost effective when it's washed regularly and proactively, not in reaction to an event (more than on that in a minute). Don't wait for a problem or violation to determine to review your company policies. If you had an ongoing review procedure, you lot could confidently accost any issues or events that y'all face, and head off a lot of potential problems.

Regular policy and procedure review

The best way to proactively review your policies and procedures is just to schedule time into the corporate agenda.

As a full general rule, y'all should review every policy between one and three years. But virtually policy management experts recommend that you review all your policies every year.

That'due south likewise more easily managed with policy direction software than a 3-ring binder. Skillful policy management software will let you set workflows in order to collaborate with your policy review committee, get together feedback, and track approvals. It can even automatically remind people to read and review policies, send out signature reminders, and integrate with your training direction program.

Here are a few times you should deport an additional policy and procedure review.

Organizational changes

When your system undergoes large-scale changes, such as modify in ownership or executive leadership, it'southward a good thought to review your relevant policies. Your policies should align with your system's mission, vision, and values, also as those of your senior leadership.

So any time you have a change in strategic direction, new leadership, a merger, or your company is purchased by another, you should review your policies and procedures.

Of course, these kinds of changes won't affect every policy. For case, a new strategic direction probably shouldn't impact your vacation policy. Just information technology may change other solar day-to-day policies and procedures.

Changes to laws or regulations

On the other manus, laws and governmental regulations alter constantly, which will affect certain procedures. Your compliance team needs to be aware of these changes and know which policies they affect.

If there is a big regulatory modify on the horizon, you should gather your policy review committee for a special meeting, rather than waiting until your annual review period.

Incorporate these pending changes into your policies as before long as possible to help your organization adjust to the new regulations and follow them right away. If you build the regulations into your policies early, the transition volition be much smoother once the new laws go into result.

An incident or policy violation

As nosotros said before, yous shouldn't wait until an incident occurs to offset reviewing policies and procedures. But things happen even when you don't wait them or desire them to. An incident of policy violation can still indicate the need for a change.

After any kind of incident, it's a skillful idea to debrief and make sure the policy had the intended issue, even if the violation nevertheless occurred. Examine the details of the incident to run across if employees followed procedures properly, and whether at that place were any gaps in training or issues with employee agreement of the policy.

This will help you lot decide whether you should revise the policy in question, make minor changes and updates, or only let it stand up.

Of course, not every violation should effect in sweeping changes. Sometimes, it'due south an isolated incident that calls for additional training or remediation for the employees involved. Sometimes, an employee just made a bad decision, even though the policy is sound, and they should be dealt with accordingly.

Merely if you find repeated violations, especially in the same area or of the aforementioned type, then the result may exist that the policy is outdated, disruptive, or requires more grooming.

Identifying Policies and Procedures That Need to Be Updated

Policy review doesn't always have to result in policy revision. Sometimes, y'all may need major changes and revisions, other times, y'all may merely need to make a few pocket-size tweaks. And sometimes, the policy is just fine every bit it is, and no revisions are needed at all.

Yous're not going to actually change or rewrite your policy manual every year, because that would be overkill. And then how practise yous know which policies demand to exist updated?

Here are a few questions to inquire during your policy review process.

Is the policy being implemented as intended?

Yous don't need a major incident or high-profile issue to know whether employees are complying with a detail policy or procedure. If they're not, you lot need to determine why.

Is the policy outdated? Are the procedures difficult to follow? Have you introduced a new technology or procedure that your policy doesn't address? Or is it a training issue?

Get feedback from your front-line employees, or anyone else affected by the policy, for some ideas on how you can amend it.

Is the policy having the desired upshot?

Every policy should have a clear goal or objective. Over fourth dimension, this will assist you measure out whether the policy is effective. But there can be times where employees are following your policies and procedures perfectly, but they're non having the desired effect.

For instance, yous implemented a policy to improve employee safety. The employees are following it only accidents are still happening at the same rate. Clearly, the policy is not doing what it's supposed to and it's not having the desired outcome.

That means yous need to look at where the policy is failing, inquire the people who are covered by the policy about what they would do differently, and make certain you take procedures and tools in identify to allow y'all to measure everything. Maybe information technology's a training issue, or it's disruptive and incomplete, or maybe information technology'southward a completely different problem.

Are the policies and procedures current and relevant?

You lot want to make sure your policies and procedures align with the way your current systems and structures actually operate. If your policies and procedures refer dorsum to erstwhile structures or technology — remember what we said about floppy disks and fax machines? — employees are more likely to ignore them because they think they don't matter.

For example, let'south say your visitor has adopted flexible remote and work-from-home arrangements, or flex scheduling. But your omnipresence and tardiness policies even so revolve around the sometime standard schedule. Y'all demand to update that policy to reflect your new piece of work arrangement, and make those new expectations articulate.

How to Update Policies

You've established a regular schedule for reviewing policies and procedures, and you've identified the policies that demand to be updated. How practise you lot really update them? Are in that location any best practices?

Of course there are!

Here are a few of them for you to consider.

Make up one's mind who is involved with this policy

Your policy review and writing team will be unlike, depending on the policy. Yous don't need the same people dealing with every policy for every department. For case, you don't want the sales department dictating accounting policy, or the finance department creating Information technology policies.

So pick team members based on the work they do and the policies you're reviewing. Your team could (and should) include supervisors who oversee the procedures, managers, Hour directors, or executives. But don't count out the frontline employees who actually do the work the policies cover.

For case, an executive is not the ideal person to create safe policies in a manufacturing operation; the people who are working on the flooring and operating the machines are the best ones for that. An HR director is not the best person to make up one's mind on the cybersecurity policy for the organization, you need a network administrator handling that.

Once you've decided on your team, explicate why the changes are needed, and what needs to happen.

If you're making small-scale changes, it may be equally elementary as just making some edits and rewrites to the policy language. In other cases, especially as information technology relates to laws and governmental regulations, it's going to be a more involved process. You'll demand subject thing experts and even your organization's legal counsel to get involved.

And if your organisation is accredited or licensed, be sure to include the accreditation director then they can make sure your policy language meets the accreditation standards the system has to follow.

Certificate all comments and changes to the policy

As the policy writing team does their piece of work, make certain to document all comments, notes, and input from every team member. This kind of data is important if there are e'er legal issues surrounding a later policy violation or its enforcement.

It'southward often helpful to appoint one policy owner to gather all the feedback and information (equally well as the comments, notes, and input) and brand the final edits.

But you don't want any essential feedback to slip through the cracks.

This is where policy direction software like PowerDMS gives you total version command and a total audit trail for each document. Yous can go on all the information, comments, notes, and any other input in a centralized location. You can create workflows, encounter who has made changes, and what they are, and even rails whether all appropriate managers have signed off, and whether all employees have reviewed the policies.

If you would like to learn more than well-nigh PowerDMS policy management software, y'all tin can contact us to schedule a demo. Or if yous're wondering what is a policy versus a process, you can read almost it on our blog.

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Source: https://www.powerdms.com/policy-learning-center/why-it-is-important-to-review-policies-and-procedures

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