What are the benefits of using policy management software?

Policy management software automates the day-to-day tasks of monitoring and enforcing company policies.

It can help you swiftly and effectively create work rules, processes and procedures and implement them across your company.

Keeping up with the challenge of ensuring your corporate policies are relevant, current, accessible, and trackable is tricky.

Policy management software, such as Policy Central, can provide an efficient solution by automating and simplifying many manual, time-consuming or paper-based tasks. You can use it to host, manage, distribute and track all your policies and procedures to mitigate risk and maintain regulatory compliance.

With a policy management solution, you can create, review and approve policies quickly and easily before making them available to staff and tracking which employees have received, read and understood them.

Policy management software can be very beneficial to your business. It can help reduce the amount of time spent on manual tasks, make it easier to comply with regulatory requirements and give you better control over your policies and procedures.

Here are some of the main benefits:

A central hub for all your policies and procedures

The world of business moves fast, and rules and regulations change all the time. Being able to respond quickly and provide your employees with the most up-to-date policy information can be challenging.

Printed materials such as staff handbooks or policy documents can become outdated quickly, making it hard to keep track of which versions are in circulation and which staff have seen them.

Email is a slightly better option, but it still relies on employees saving the latest copy of a policy and deleting previous ones to ensure they have access to the latest version.

And while shared folders can give access to the correct policies, if they’re not maintained properly or kept up to date, they may still contain the wrong information.

Policy management software is designed to address these issues to ensure your people always have access to the correct information at the right time.

It enables you to store all your latest policy documents and any associated media such as training videos, audio files or PDFs, in a secure, central location.

Improved communication

Your company’s policies will be effective only if your employees have read and understood them before a problem arises. So, communicating the value and importance of these documents is essential. Improving communication will enable your team to better understand how your policies relate to their day-to-day roles, why they matter, and in the case of updated policies, what’s changed from previous versions. This helps to minimise risk and create a better culture of compliance across your organisation.

Platforms like Policy Central can help you improve the dissemination of policies to your staff by allowing you to send an automated notification every time a new policy is published, or an existing one is updated, so everyone is aware.

Better collaboration

In many businesses – particularly larger ones – policy documents tend to pass across several desks before they are approved and implemented.

So, having a seamless process in place to make reviewing, amending and approving policies easier is essential.

While email and document sharing tools have their benefits, it can often still be difficult to track everyone’s changes and keep on top of version control.

Policy management systems allow you to automate the review and approval process to ensure that the right people have seen and inputted into the document before it’s signed off and goes live.

Again, this can help reduce risk and ensure that everyone who needs to see and agree a policy has the opportunity to do so.

Better document security and control

In larger businesses or organisations, not every member of staff needs to see every single policy.

For example, there may be policies in play that apply only to team leaders or need to be seen only by your senior managers, which means you’ll need some way of controlling access to who sees what.

Controlling who can modify or delete documents is also essential.

Many cloud-hosting platforms or shared drives are designed to make everything available to everyone, making maintaining document security a challenge.

Policy management software solves this problem with in-built controls to determine who can access each document and what access privileges – such as viewing, editing or approving documents – they have.

Tracking compliance

Arguably the most significant benefit of using policy management software is the way it can track who has signed to say they have seen and understood a policy.

Many businesses rely on manual methods such as paper sign-off sheets or email read receipts to keep track of who has read a policy, but these don’t do enough to hold your staff accountable or ensure compliance.

A policy management solution like Policy Central allows you to easily track every step of the process, from notifying employees of a new policy or update to tracking when they opened the document and signed to say they had read and understood it.

Using policy management software can significantly reduce the risk for your business when a policy violation occurs, as you’ll be able to evidence whether or not the employees in question have seen and accepted it.

Policy management software can help bring consistency to how your policies and procedures are created, updated and communicated. This can help you positively influence the behaviour of your employees and reduce your compliance risk.

Policy Central’s integrated online policy management platform can give you complete control of your organisation’s policy lifecycle. To find out more and book a free consultation, get in touch today.