Summary: A sneak peek into our latest Procedure and Policy Management software release, Policy Assist.
We worked with several of our customers in the finance and healthcare sectors to determine what their needs are, and how we could translate that into our intranet software. We learned that many organizations that we serve require in-depth Policy and Procedure Management tools, so we decided to center our latest product release around just that!
Policy Assist, the latest version of our software, contains a number of improvements, including:
- Image Slider Widget for rotating banners on your home page
- Policy/Procedure Read and Agree
- Policy/Procedure Review Dates & Reminders
- Drag and Drop File Upload for easier uploading of multiple files
- AD Synchronization Service which can target multiple domain servers and OUs
This blog highlights some of the unique features in Policy Assist that help with Policy Management.
Policy Management Life Cycle
A policy (or procedure) has a life cycle within an organization. Polices are periodically reviewed and updated if necessary. Once approved, they are distributed to staff who must confirm they have read the changes. The cycle then starts again on the next policy review date. Policy Assist helps manage and automate processes in the Policy Review and Read and Agree stages.
Managers Get Better Visibility into Policy Management
Policy or document managers need to ensure policies are updated and communicated to stay in compliance. Rather than tracking the current state policies in a Microsoft Excel or Word document, let Policy Assist track this for you with dashboards integrated within the intranet.
Policy Review Dashboard
The Policy Review Dashboard is a central, always available list of policies that need to be periodically reviewed.
- View all policies that require periodic review
- Take action on policies overdue for review, or coming due to review soon
- Ensure every policy has a policy owner or expert assigned
Having the Policy Review Dashboard integrated into your intranet ensures managers always have access to the current state of the policies being managed. Managers can tell at a glance which policies need to be updated, and who has been assigned responsibility. Based on the next review date, the intranet can also automatically remind policy owners and experts their policy is due for review.
Read and Agree Dashboard
The Read and Agree Dashboard tracks all policies that must be read by staff.
- View all policies that require staff confirmation
- Track completion rate during read and agree process
- Export list of remaining staff for follow up with supervisors or department managers
Getting Staff Confirmation of Policy Changes
Staff need to confirm they have read either new or updated policies, but are often busy with other tasks. Rather than chase staff yourself, let Policy Assist send reminders automatically.
Automated Reminders
Based on your due dates, Policy Assist can send two different types of reminders:
- Reminder policy owners and experts their policy is due soon for review
- Remind staff there in an updated policy to read
Reminders can be sent via email or site alerts, and you can send up to 3 reminders ahead of the specified due dates. In addition, for read and agrees, you can add a Policy Reminder Widget on your intranet home page to gently remind staff there is an outstanding policy they need to read.
Be Ready for Audit
During an audit, you may be asked to produce an older version of a policy, as well as historical read and agree user logs. Rather than keeping these backups manually, let the intranet store this historical information for you.
Read & Agree Logs for Audit
To be ready for audit, Policy Assist supports two different methods of saving the records of who have read and confirmed in the past.
- For policies that don’t change frequently, but require staff to reconfirm every year, each year’s read confirmations are automatically saved before the read confirmations are reset. Store as many previous years as you need.
- When a policy does change, previous user read confirmations are stored with the previous version of the file when file versioning is enabled.
Policy Assist makes it easy to store and track both previous versions and user read confirmations. No matter how far back an auditor asks you to retrieve a list of users who have read a policy, you have the information at hand.
If managing policies is a time-consuming task for your organization, Policy Assist can help by centralizing the tracking of policies and automating the internal communication tasks. Because Policy Assist is integrated into your intranet, you can manage policy tracking, communication, and read confirmation all within a single system.
If you’d like to learn more about Policy Assist, please watch the Introducing Policy Assist Webinar below.
