Policies and procedures are essential tools for any workplace, providing a framework for operations and ensuring compliance with legal and regulatory standards. They help establish clear expectations for behavior and performance, thereby promoting a culture of accountability and consistency. Effective policy management includes drafting comprehensive policies, reviewing them regularly, and ensuring they are easily accessible to all employees. This approach helps mitigate risks, improve decision-making, and maintain organizational integrity.
In this post, we’re going to do a deep dive into the world of policies and procedures, looking at what they are, why they are important and how to manage them. We’re not expecting you to love policies and procedures, but we hope by the end of the article you’ll view them a little more positively!
Policies and procedures are structured sets of principles and rules that provide guidance and standardisation for processes across an organisation.
Policies generally outline the key principles and expectations that guide behaviour and decision-making within a company. In contrast, procedures offer detailed instructions on how to carry out specific tasks or actions. While policies tend to remain consistent, procedures may evolve more frequently as operational needs change. Although they are distinct, the line between policies and procedures can sometimes blur, with documents occasionally containing both elements, as well as related forms, guidelines, and checklists.
Policies and procedures are essential for guiding behaviour, standardising processes, and ensuring compliance within the workplace.
Here are some of the key reasons why policies and procedures play a crucial role in maintaining an efficient and compliant work environment:
In any given working day, employees complete multiple tasks, some relating to their role and others to more general processes. Additionally, employees may have to make several decisions during the working week. Policies and procedures provide essential baseline information for employees to get things done and make accompanying decisions.
Most organisations seek to standardise processes across different divisions, regions and locations in order to drive efficiency, support customer experience, raise standards and provide consistency and simplicity across complex structures and diverse workforces. Having well-defined policies and procedures underpins this standardisation.
Policies and procedures define expected levels of professional conduct and behaviour, covering multiple aspects of organisational life including treatment of colleagues, interaction with customers, risk management and more. Having these policies and procedures is important for the smooth day-to-day running of any business.
There are a range of different policies and procedures that must be followed for regulatory, legal and compliance reasons. Businesses need to enforce these policies, and may also need to show external regulators and other bodies they are doing everything they can to make sure they are followed. The way policies and procedures are managed and disseminated is a major component of this. Similarly, organisations may have to adhere to standards such as ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and demonstrate policies are being followed to the relevant certification body.
It’s not just legal and regulatory compliance that is important – having the right policies and procedures helps minimise risks across other areas, such as:
It can be an overwhelming and even confusing time when a person starts at a new company, with a lot to do and learn. Having clear policies and procedures helps new starters complete onboarding processes and settle in more quickly; in turn, a positive onboarding experience also reduces employee turnover.
Organisations are in a constant state of flux, and managing change across the workforce can be hard. Having clear policies and procedures helps manage change and outline new ways of working, both large and small.
Values and employee wellbeing are increasingly being recognised as important components of employee experience. Ensuring policies and procedures align with company values and provide safeguards for wellbeing can make a tangible difference.
The employee value proposition (EVP) of a company spells out some of its key HR policies and procedures, such as opportunities for career progression, learning and training, flexible working, maternity and paternity leave, pay and benefits and so on. The EVP of an organisation is central to attracting and retaining talent.
Policies and procedures provide a foundation for identifying areas of improvement within the organisation. Regular reviews and updates ensure that processes evolve with changing business needs and industry standards.
How should you manage your policies and procedures? There are a range of best practices to follow that will help ensure employees can easily access the latest documents and information, safe in the knowledge that they are accurate and up to date.
Policies and procedures are there to standardise processes and minimise risks, but they also help employees get things done in the best way possible, supporting productivity and underpinning a good employee experience. Ensuring your entire workforce can easily access the right policies and procedure at the point of need is key to them being followed; there should not be groups who do not have access, such as your frontline staff. A central policies and procedures library available through your intranet is a proven model that works.
Have just one source of truth for your policies and procedures to avoid issues with multiple versions that cause confusion and result in employees performing the wrong actions. Having multiple versions also undermines employee trust in any central policies and procedures library.
Policies and procedures must always be kept up to date so they are accurate. Even if changes are small, it’s always best to execute any updates as quickly as possible, minimising the risk of errors down the line.
Establishing robust version control over policies and procedures is essential to prevent multiple versions circulating. Having a clear convention for numbering different versions and using the right solution (such as a SharePoint library) will help.
Many of the above best practices are achieved by having clear, defined ownership of each policy or procedure, with named individuals responsible for executing the right lifecycle management processes around regular reviews, updating their policy and more.
As well as making policies and procedures easy to access, employees also need to be able to find the right information or document when required. Ensuring policies and procedures are findable and discoverable is critical. There are various approaches which help with this, including:
Some policies may not be relevant to different groups of employees based on their role, location, level of hierarchy and so on. For example, in large global companies, HR policies often vary from country to country. Leveraging personalisation and targeting to ensure users access the right policies based on their profile will drive relevance and make sure the right policies are followed.
There are some very important mandatory policies that you will want to ensure everyone reads; sometimes, you will need to demonstrate to external parties that this has been done. These external parties are likely to be regulators or certification bodies, but they can be customers too. Running an employee attestation process where you can track who has read which policy, who has confirmed they have done so or even who has agreed to adhere to what is the best way to achieve this.
Ensure you have some kind of auditing process around your policies and procedures that records who has made changes to policy documentation and when. This helps force policy and procedure owners to take their role seriously, and also demonstrates to regulators and certification bodies that you have a robust approach to policy management.
Policies and procedures are there to be used and followed, not ignored. A 50-page document written in “legalese” is never going to be read by your employees, and while it may be important to have from a regulatory, legal, compliance or risk perspective, creating a shorter version that is readable, digestible and actionable is far more likely to result in policies actually being followed.
Allowing access to policies and procedures at the right time, directly at the point of need, helps boost adherence. For example, if an employee is making a travel booking, arranging easy access to the travel policy if they need to review it can be useful, even if it is just a link on the requisite form. Similarly, making it simple for your new hires to access the policies and procedures they need to read and attest to during the onboarding process will drive efficiency.
Have a standard naming convention in place for your policies and procedures to ensure employees can find the right document and avoid confusion.
