HR Policy: More than Just Ticking Boxes

Compliance, regulation and security: these are the reasons why organisations write policies. But how can you be sure that staff have read, understood, and agreed to a policy? And how can you demonstrate policy compliance to auditors and regulators? Posting policies on the intranet, or relying on e-mails or staff handbooks leaves policies ignored, and impossible to track.

So how can you get the right policies to the right staff and, more importantly, ensure that they understand and actively sign up to them, while ensuring that the process is recorded?

Facing Up to the Challenge

Companies have the challenge of achieving and also demonstrating compliance, while at the same time maintaining business competitiveness and avoiding an unnecessary administrative workload.

With policies changing, new people joining the organisation and people switching departments, the task of tracking and managing compliance issues can often prove to be time-consuming. Traditional approaches such as e-mail or paper-based policies and acceptance forms are labour intensive and inefficient, and cannot be relied upon to ensure legal business obligations are met.

E-mails can simply be deleted or ignored by employees, and it is unfeasible to expect employees to sit and digest a 100-page corporate handbook. A user-friendly, bite-sized approach, which can be incorporated easily into the working day, will ensure policies are actually read and accepted.

Policy management software can be used to deliver HR policy directly to the desktop, by presenting staff not with some dusty lever arch file, but with key points and the information they really need, in bite-sized, digestible form.

In this way, organisations are able to meet business obligations and HR requirements automatically, without generating an unnecessary administrative burden.

Flexibility is Key

Clicking on the ‘yes’ option is not enough to ensure corporate compliance. Employees require a real understanding of policy, and businesses need to both achieve and actively demonstrate this level of understanding.

Policy management solutions automatically test your staff on key points, to ensure they have actually taken in and understood the policy, as opposed to taking the path of least resistance by simply clicking ‘yes’ to every automatic prompt.

Managers get a clear picture of any refusal to read policies or of a lack of understanding, and can take the necessary action. Access to certain areas of the network can be blocked, or staff directed to relevant training pages to help them understand the issues at stake.

At the same time, don’t neglect business demands. Employees may have a deadline to meet or a client meeting to prepare for, so it is important to adopt a flexible approach, by staggering the release of policy details and enabling staff to defer reading the information if they have other business priorities to address.

Case Study

Tilney Investment Management, an independent wealth manager in the UK, chose to implement a policy management software solution to strengthen its ability to practice and demonstrate Financial Services Authority (FSA) compliance.

Tilney is regulated by the FSA and has a legal obligation to keep all employees up-to-date with the latest policies and regulations. Failure to do so could result in serious financial losses, legal issues and damage to the company’s reputation.

The policy management software allows staff to read, understand and accept all aspects of corporate policy, from financial compliance to IT acceptable use policies and anti money-laundering regulations.

An e-mail and paper-based approach to compliance was previously in place, which was both time- and labour-intensive, requiring a lot of administrative effort chasing up employees for signed forms, and processing and storing policies.

Tilney is now able to manage policy updates more effectively, by staggering the flow of new policy to staff and enabling them to deter reading on five occasions if their work commitments require it, minimising any impact on business productivity and ensuring the required agreement to key policies is automatically secured.