A Comprehensive Guide to Efficient Policy Review

Policies need to adapt for a variety of reasons, be it changes in your organization, evolving industry norms, new contractual obligations or new legislation, to name but a few reasons that may necessitate document review. Policies anyway need to be reviewed on a regular, pre-determined basis. Your policies will thrive or either away according to how efficient your review process is. 

Important Factors to Ensure Efficient Policy Reviews

• All team members/document users know their assigned roles vis-à-vis the review process;
• Communication between document guardians, users, editors, and reviewers is consistent and open at all times during the review process;
• Edits, changes or comments to documents need to be easily tracked and readily viewable at all times, including for further review or analysis at a later date; and
• Policy versions need to be logically maintained, with the most recent, real-time version readily available and duly annotated as such. 

To ensure the above, you need software that ensures an efficient, intelligent policy review process. 

Features to Look Out For With Policy-Creating Software

1. Integration: does the software you have opted for offer complete integration with the word processing software your enterprise typically uses? That is a very important consideration. By way of example, the ConvergePoint software uses native Microsoft integrations. That means that a single-sign on your Microsoft 365 account will allow your users to access all documentation within your existing active directory. From there they can know what roles have been assigned to them, to what documents they’ve been granted access, and so forth.

Being in full sync with your chosen word processing platform means affording your users the ability to work natively within that platform. That includes the creation of documents and subsequent editing facilities without having to learn or remember new word processing commands or shortcuts. 

2. Email communication: Does your policy review software include means of communication that enable collaboration between different team members? 

Related Article: Top 5 Essential Things for Collaborative Policy Making

For example, email notifications should be an important aspect of your policy review process. Why? Because team members need to be alerted of needed edits or reviews as deadlines loom or lapse. It cannot be presumed that team members will faithfully check up on their status regarding documents on a regular basis. Some team members may do that, but many will not, either forgetting to do so or simply not being thorough at document oversight. 

Remember: your people are busy, and people are forgetful. Having an automated email alert system can be invaluable for your document control, not to mention quality of communications. With our software, email alerts and notifications are sent out via Outlook, itself synced to your entire Microsoft 365 suite.

3. Other means of communication: Policy reviews may require more than emails to ensure communication. Software needs to provide other means of communication by which team members can discuss, debate, and assess needed changes to existing policies.
 
So, for example, the ConvergePoint policy management software has alerts that can be triggered from within Microsoft Teams. Many businesses rely heavily on video chat platforms such as Teams and Zoom these days for their intra-departmental and inter-team communications, particularly in this post-COVID era in which many employees continue to work remotely or with hybrid schedules between office and home. Approvals of documents should be accomplished from right within your given email server or preferred video chat platform.

The review process is a highly important stage in the overall lifecycle of any policy – or other document for that matter. The choice should be to invest in software that ensures a smooth policy review process that is intuitive and, importantly, customizable and fit for purpose.