If you are looking for new policy and procedure templates and manuals or if you are in the process of updating the ones you have, you should also think about how you want to manage those documents. Even the best policy and procedure manual won’t be effective, if your organization doesn’t have good processes in place to ensure that:
- The policies and procedures are approved by the right people in your organization before they get published
- Your organization has one central repository with version control and history
- Your employees get access (only) to the latest and most recent version of policies and procedures
- Your employees can access their policies and procedures online, from anywhere, anytime
- Your employees actually read and understand the policies
- Your management can track the publication and acceptance of policies
There are many different approaches on how policies and procedures are managed: They get printed and put on desks, they get sent by email, they get saved on a shared drive, or they get posted to an intranet. However, none of these approaches will satisfy the above requirements- please review them again. If you would like to reduce risk and improve efficiencies you should consider a dedicated solution for managing your policy and procedure templates.
