Are you Drowning in Documents?
Policy creation and management have come a long way in a very short time. It wasn’t that long ago that providing reassurance to your CEO or Board of Directors that your company was on top of compliance meant giving tours of file rooms with neatly organized binders of hard copies of documents with signatures in ink on actual paper. Today, of course, everything is digitally stored on servers, preferably with offsite backups in secure locations. Every policy that has ever been created or updated is accessible at the push of a button. If you’re not sure of the title of that policy, you can search by keyword, full text, or even Boolean logic. Audits have been reduced to a mere inconvenience, as you press another button to access all relevant documentation in seconds.
When your third cup of coffee kicks in and snaps you back to reality, your multicolored spreadsheet might present a very different picture. You send out policy update notifications to all employees, whether the policy is relevant to them or not, just to be on the safe side. You’re only able to send out those notifications after weeks of wrangling busy people for input and signoff, chasing down multiple draft versions that seem to appear out of nowhere, and losing hours of much needed sleep worrying about how many other draft versions are still sitting on laptop or desktop hard drives.
Having the Documents Isn’t Enough
An audit – even an internal one – is your worst nightmare. Days and sometimes even weeks are lost as you try to track down all of the relevant documentation for just one policy change. There’s no shortage of documentation for that change, but organizing it into a logical format that shows who initiated the update, who was involved in drafting the update, who approved the change, and who collected the attestations confirming that employees had been notified of the change, can take hours of time – and that’s assuming that all of those documents can be easily located.
At this point, you start to wonder if having everything in writing really is a benefit in the end. Having a comprehensive paper trail (digital or otherwise) is critical for any audit or non-compliance issue, but if you’re unable to produce that trail in a timely manner or to present it with a high degree of confidence as to accuracy, you are at risk of serious trouble.
Our comprehensive policy creation and management software solutions can save you from drowning in documents. Operating on one secure SharePoint portal using templates built on industry best practices, your team can manage access through role-based permissions. A detailed version history page provides formal confirmation of version status that supports every element of policy workflow from creation to ongoing management, revision, and replacement.
The opportunity to move your manual systems to the next level is closer than you may think. To learn more about our software now available on SharePoint On-Premise, SharePoint Online via Office 365, and as a Software-as-a-Service, schedule a demo now.
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