How to Engage Your Employees with the Policies and Procedures of Your Business?

Many organizations spend countless hours and resources in developing their policies and procedures for ensuring a compliance environment. They expect every employee to get familiarized with their policies and to make an effort to uphold those guidelines. However, policy and procedure management may not be the topic of interest for all employees, especially for those who work outside the legal environment of their respective organizations.

How one can engage their employees and teach them the right approaches to achieve their policies and procedures? In certain cases, employees might not feel motivated to spend time reading and learning lengthy policies and procedures. It is critical for every organization to captivate and retain their employees’ attention for effectively managing their policies and procedures.

To ease the process, here are a few unique ways to help you engage your employees with your business policies and procedures. 

Analyze the Nature of Your Employees

The very first step your legal or compliance team should take before executing smart ways to deliver your policies and procedures is to evaluate the nature of your organization and the staff. You may have incredibly diverse employees in your organization. While some may feel encouraged to learn your policies and procedures, others may lack interest. Finding the ways your staff members will respond to your messages will help in creating methods to engage them well. 

Make More Presentable Information

Not every employee would like to spend the time to fully read through your policies and procedures. One way to engage them is to incentivize the process. Present the information in a more creative way to help make the reading process more fun for your employees. Adding quizzes, games, times, social learning or giveaways are some of the ways to encourage them to pay more attention. It will also give you a clear understanding of whether your information is well received or not.

Use Visual Technology for Interactive Content 

Adding videos, Infographics, and other visual materials into your content is a great way to engage your employees. Visual content can help segment the whole presentation, cover as much as you want, and make it more interactive. It gives employees an opportunity to learn piece by piece and to ask questions while reading interactive presentations.

These tips will help you create more engaging information by using your policy and procedure management software that will ensure regulatory compliance. 

Are Your P&Ps GOOD or Bad? Here’s the Definitive Test

Many companies have heated internal debates on this question: “Are our written policies and procedures (P&Ps) good or bad? “ How do you know?

Some people measure quality based on whether P&Ps exist and are physically accessible to staff, whether they are grammatically correct, or how they look. Criticisms range from “Our P&Ps are too long” “We don’t have enough pictures” “We need different fonts.” “Playscript format is best” “No, a flowchart is the answer.” “We don’t need details.” “We need much more detail.” and on and on.

When it comes judging to the quality of your policy and procedures manuals, it’s all a matter of opinion, right? Wrong! In this post, we show you how to tell OBJECTIVELY if your corporate policies and procedures are “good” or not.

The definitive test is how you answer this questions: Are we getting the PERFORMANCE results we want?

The term “Performance results” is a little broad, so we’ve broken it down into 7 specific areas relating to operations and training. If you answer YES to just one question, your standard operating procedures are either missing in action or need fixing and you are not getting the return you should for the time, money, and effort you’re spending on writing policies and procedures.

Diagnosis Checklist

1. Training Difficulties
   Does it take too long to get new employees productive? Do supervisors spend too much time answering the same questions? Is training inconsistent? (How are you training your people?)


2. Inefficiencies, Slowness
   Does it take too long to: Perform routine tasks? Open new locations? Take a business concept and “franchise” it? Implement major changes? Roll-out new systems? Launch new products?


3. Errors, Waste (Quality Control)
   Are people making too many errors? Do you have difficulty controlling the quality of service, products without a lot of labor and oversight.


4. Knowledge Retention
   Are there areas where you would be at significant risk or project failure if your STAR performer or consultant left today? Are best practices in peoples’ heads? Are your “experts” overwhelmed by people constantly asking them for help?


5. Inconsistency / One-offs
   Are work processes inconsistent? Is there a significant variance in how one person performs a job vs. another person? Do people often re-invent the wheel?


6. Fire-fighting
   Are managers spending too much time fighting fires, dealing with mundane issues, instead of mentoring employees and focusing on innovation?


7. Regulatory Compliance / Liability Risk
   Are there areas of exposure? High risks? Are Board Members signing off on policies they aren’t reading and don’t fully understand?

Anyone of these issues by itself is serious. The financial impact could be costing you tens of thousands of dollars (or could possibly even you out of business).

A “good” P&P system is the most efficient and least costly way to alleviate these problems, so if you still have them, whatever you’re doing (or not doing) isn’t working. Here’s the bottom line.

If people are USING your corporate Policy and Procedure manuals and achieving the expected results with minimal supervision, then you get an A+. If you have operations, quality, and training costs under control and down to a science, then whatever you are doing is working. If you have a systematic and sustainable way to transfer the best practices of your star performers then BRAVO.

That’s the true test of whether P&Ps are GOOD or not. Nothing else really matters.

Through our Operations Mapping approach and Zavanta software, COMPROSE helps our clients design their policy and procedure systems that meet this test. 

Source: https://www.comprose.com/are-your-pps-good-or-bad-heres-the-definitive-test/

All You Need to Know About Policy and Procedure Management Software

Many organizations generally struggle to keep their policies and procedures updated, organized, and easy to find. Still many of us are not aware about the term policy and procedure software.

What do you mean by a policy and procedure software?

Policies are different from procedures as these are the rules and regulations that are used by an organization to carry out business and achieve long term goals.

Whereas procedures can provide you the details to achieve the policies. In other words, they can provide you a step-by-step process of tasks that are required for each policy. They are responsible for implementing policy that makes use of procedures to ensure agreement with strategic direction, points of governance or statutory requirements.

Here we will discuss about the 6 key components of policy and procedure software:

1. Create: Various types of documents should easily load into the software.
2. Approve: The software should automate the Review and Approval cycle and there should not be any need to chase the opinion of subject matter experts.
3. Notify: When published, end users should receive notifications hence directing them towards the document.
4. Test: End users should be able to view, take a questionnaire and acknowledge document online, anywhere, anytime. All this can be done using an internet connection helping an end user to act on a document and then leave an authenticated electronic signature.
5. Reminders: The software should send or schedule automated reminders to those who have not yet acted on a document.
6. Reports: Managers should be able to check all the metrics that are related to their documents. They should be able to check who has worked on a document and posted any test score or acknowledgment comment. Last but not the least, you need to track every action within the system. 

Why do companies need policies and procedure management? Here are the four reasons:

• It encourages a true culture of continuous improvement and internal communication.
• It provides evidence of an internal control system that follows regulations and standards.
• It ensures fundamental operational processes are executed in an effective and consistent manner.
• It controls and manages risks and threats to the organization.

Organizations that integrate policy and procedure communication into their system achieve improved quality, reduced training / turnover cost and more empowered workforce. Zavanta is an all-in-one solution that is used to capture, manage and share knowledge. Employees have 24/7 access to whatever they need to do their jobs in a better manner by using high-level of policy and procedure management software.

Zavanta Software Principles Highlighted in New Book “Secrets of Success with Procedures

In his new book Secrets of Success With Procedures, Jack Nicholas, Jr., BS, MBA, P.E., CMRP, CRL, internationally recognized expert in business operations and maintenance reliability and a decorated US Navy veteran and naval engineer, shares his experiences on the importance of written procedures to operations success. Jack describes and discusses many management attributes centered on written procedures and includes a sample procedure found in Zavanta software.

Secrets of Success with Procedures is a quick, must-read for anyone involved in Policy, Process, Plans and Procedure management or for leaders wanting to make long-lasting improvements in their organization.  Jack’s extensive experience validates yet again that ‘Good Procedures = Success.’ He shows that with clearly communicated standard operating procedures, organizations can drive the outcomes they want. 

If you have thought of standard operating procedures as nice-to-have non-essentials or a “necessary evil,” see if you still think so AFTER you read Chapter 7, ‘How to Investigate Procedure Not Followed’ and the included case study entitled ’The Matchbox and the Nuclear Reactor.’ The concepts Jack presents are based on principles of human behavior supported by case studies showing just how effective and essential they are.

Source: https://goo.gl/8zgwsH

Know Why Do Organizations Need Policy and Procedure Management Software

In this ever growing, regulated, business world, the use of paper and file have become archaic as dial up modems. Organizations who take time to adopt the recent changes suffer as it becomes tough for them to adapt to the significant, increased efficiency, improved process, and reduced risk from the proper implementation of a policy and procedure software solution. Not all the policy and procedure management solutions are made equal, there are various important characteristics that any solution needs to possess so that users can stay ahead.

If your organization is not in a mood to currently employ the cloud software solution, then you need to ask yourself:

• It is getting tough to manage your important policies and procedures and as an organization you often get stuck in the review and approval process 
• Do you find it easy to track and manage the employee compliance on your important documents? 
• Do you think it is easy for you to update, replace, and distribute the newer versions of your existing policies and procedures? 

 If not, then it is the time to go for an effective policy and procedure management software solution:

1. It helps employees to retrieve their policies or procedures 
2. It will show only the most current version that is available to the end user. Also, it allows the policy and procedure managers to update and replace older versions of the policy. 
3. It helps to automate the review and the approval cycle so that the policies and procedures can be reviewed and approved by the subject matter experts before they publish it. It helps the organizations to set up groups of subject matter experts to give advice on business-critical documents. 
4. To utilize different versions of important policies and procedures. The solution should be able to automatically update the versioning and can be used by the end user, to help with the document retrieval. 
5. To establish a distribution mechanism to ensure the right people get the right policies. It helps to create groups to differentiate the members of your organization and they receive the policies, procedures and all other business critical documents. 

A proper policy and procedure management software system helps to easily use, easily scalable, contain the online repository of various business critical documents to automate the document lifestyle. of business-critical documents. Lastly, all actions on the system should be easily tracked and reported on, to provide insulation against potential litigation. Those that implement these best practices would never get