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Policy and Procedure Management: Best Practices and Resources

Policy Management Software – Best Practices

Looking for quick reference guides or tips to improve your policy management system? Take a look at the articles and tips below.

Improving Current Policy Management Processes

Policy and Procedure Management: How to Best Captivate Employees
When compliance departments and legal teams spend hours and countless resources to develop policies and procedures for their respective organization, they expect every employee to familiarize themselves with them and to make an effort to uphold those guidelines. However, policies and procedures may not be the most exciting topic for all employees, especially if they work outside the confines of your compliance or legal environment…READ MORE
Are Your Policy Management Processes Too Complex?
Could your policy management processes be too complicated and overly confusing? Having the ability to have custom and powerful processes is exciting for any company, but could they become a vulnerability to your organization? Including all of your employees?…READ MORE
How Much is Your Policy Management System Costing You?
What does your policy management system truly cost you? Whether your organization is operating on outdated software or by manual processes, you’ll realize being behind the curve, and your competition, can hold you back financially and prevent positive growth…READ MORE
Standard Operating Procedure Management on SharePoint - Why is it Trending?
When businesses recognize they need a better way to handle SOPs, they may shop around for a third party solution, adding a level of uncertainty considering the lack of familiarity. Fortunately, these organizations are realizing how SharePoint, the platform they’re already using for collaboration and management, is a great option to handle SOP management…READ MORE
Policies, Processes and Procedures: Why You Need All 3
Businesses know that they need to have a system made up of policies, processes and procedures. Often businesses have issues discerning which is which or use the terms interchangeably, resulting in them lacking one of the elements. All three, however, are necessary to run a successful, organized business… READ MORE
10 Policies All Companies Should Have
When your business expands quickly, it can be hard to stay on top of policy creation and management. Sure, there may be quite a few unwritten rules that employees seem to be aware of and your organization just hasn’t gotten around to putting on paper yet, but those rules tend to cause more confusion than not. Just like the telephone game we played as kids, new rules heard “through the grapevine” are easily not shared correctly, misinterpreted and misunderstood… READ MORE
3 Crucial Responsibilities All Managers Have to Employees When It Comes to Policies
As a manager — no matter what your specific role within the organization or what size or type company you work for — you have three important responsibilities to your employees when it comes to policies and procedures: access, education and enforcement… READ MORE
Increase Employee Engagement by Involving Them in Policy Management

Businesses today know that attracting and retaining top talent are essential to a business’s livelihood — which is why employee engagement has become increasingly important.

Building employee engagement (and retention) starts from their first day at the office, when you introduce them to your company’s culture through sharing the company’s policies and procedures. A company’s policies give employees an immediate sense of what the company stands for — its values, business ethics and personality. In turn, sound policies reassure employees, giving them the confidence and security to work to their full potential… READ MORE

What Does a Learning Environment Look Like Within Your Company?
One of the best ways to improve employee retention is to not just train them initially, but constantly develop them by creating a work environment that fosters communication and learning. Both people and your company change over time, and if you’re looking to build long-term relationships, it’s important that you understand how each other is developing and you grow in the same direction — by constantly communicating your priorities and offering ongoing training… READ MORE
You Don't Have to Be a Large Organization to Have Great Policies and Procedures
Every time a discussion on policy and procedure management arises, there are always people in the room who think it applies to large enterprises only — and definitely not to them yet. Often, information and resources neglect the same needs for smaller organizations, but just because the organization is smaller to mid-size, doesn’t mean a policy and procedure management structure isn’t just as important… READ MORE
Policies and Procedure Management: Proactive vs. Reactive
Your employees’ knowledge of company policies and procedures makes all the difference when it comes to compliance and industry regulations. Polices and procedures are intended to serve as a reference guide for certain scenarios or situations. What happens when those scenarios actually take place and your employees don’t know what to do? Costly mistakes can be made and employee morale can be crushed, all at the expense of your company… READ MORE
3 Simple Steps to Better Policies and Procedures Management
Without policies and procedures management, no company can last. Policy and procedure management is the strong foundation established for a stable and successful future; therefore it is essential to have an effective policies and procedures process… READ MORE
Calculating the True Cost of a Policy or Procedure
Businesses are dynamic to meet the demands of the marketplace. We talk about mergers, acquisitions and subsidiaries as part of the common business dialogue, and we sometimes forget that it’s the compliance team that holds the seams of an ever-changing environment together. They are the force that guides corporate cohesion, by creating policies and procedures around operational and regulatory requirements… READ MORE
Addressing Challenges in Policy and Procedure Management
We’ve all sat in meetings, and more meetings, trying to hash out policy guidelines. It takes time. It takes multiple meetings. It takes dealing with different people from diverse areas both inside and outside the organization. It takes emailing back and forth after the meeting, and it can get confusing trying to keep track of it all. One thing that is imperative for policy management is being able to take all the pieces of information and keep them organized in one place… READ MORE
Policy and Procedure Management: You're Only as Compliant as Your Employees
Policies are put in place to ensure everyone is on the same page about their jobs, from how to take vacation and sick days to how to use equipment safely. Some policies can be seen as flexible, whereas other policies need to be upheld in order for companies to be compliant with local, state or federal laws. When distributing policies, it’s important to recognize which policy is which, because asking every employee to sign off on every single procedure is counterproductive… READ MORE
Policy and Procedure Changes: Engaging Your Employees
If you think employees look at those new policies and procedures you send them, you’re only just thinking. How do you know for sure? Sure, some employees have enough time and interest to read through the documentation, but even within that group, how many pay attention to the changes that matter most?  With a simple questionnaire, you can make sure they do… READ MORE
Are Your Policies Centralized?
Businesses are dynamic and ever-evolving to meet the demands of the marketplace. We talk about mergers, acquisitions and subsidiaries as part of the common business dialogue, but we don’t often stop to think about the compliance team that holds the seams of an ever-changing environment together. They are the one central force that guides corporate cohesion by creating policies and procedures around operational and regulatory requirements… READ MORE
Policy and Procedure Management: Behind the Scenes
Every industry and business has certain regulations to follow and policies to implement for very different, yet equally important, reasons. The creation, distribution and acknowledgement of company policies and procedures ensure safety, act a reference guide and provide protection from the unknown… READ MORE
Preventing Data Breaches Starts with Creating and Training on Policies
The 2013 Target breach, 2014 Sony breach and other highly publicized security breaches have pushed the need for strong cyber-security to the forefront. Often, organizations are left vulnerable to cyber-criminals for a few reasons… READ MORE
Why Policy Management is Essential to Your Disaster Recovery Plan

Do your policies and procedures include a disaster recovery or emergency action plan? What happens when a natural disaster, power outage or other unplanned event occurs?

About 40% – 60% of businesses never reopen following a disaster, according to the Small Business Administration, meaning an emergency action plan plays an essential role in helping businesses recover and continue.

The first step in building a plan is to create policies for disaster recovery and then define detailed procedures for each policy… READ MORE

Addressing Potential Compliance Issues

Policy Management Audit - How to Best Prepare
When audits are due at organizations around the nation, compliance and legal departments are stressed to provide the necessary documents and resources to meet government or industry regulations. Preparations to pass audit tests should begin well before the scheduled date and take lots of time, requiring organizations to stay on top of their policy management processes…READ MORE
Compliance Overview: Standard Operating Procedures

SOP Full Article

Accountability for creating SOPs within an organization is often dynamic, as policy creation should be a combined effort from both the regulatory compliance team and operational leaders. Operational leaders are not always in the same location as compliance team members, making it sometimes difficult to coordinate. The right technology, however, can bring the right compliance leaders together to efficiently create relevant SOPs… READ MORE

Compliance: What are Standard Operating Procedures?

SOP Article I of III

Every organization has rules, policies, procedures and standards by which its employees must abide. The choice to agree and act in accordance with the standards of the organization must be a voluntary action by the employees. Enforcing the standards can be difficult, if they haven’t been properly communicated to the employee base through documentation, managerial involvement and company culture… READ MORE

Compliance: 3 Reasons Why We Have Standard Operating Procedures

SOP Article II of III

SOP defines what an organization’s policies are, while outlining the steps necessary to respond to the situation denoted in the policy. They’re our quick reference guide on the daily in-and-outs of how to perform necessary job functions. It especially becomes handy as organizations grow and experience turnover, promotions and general human resource movement between organizations… READ MORE

Compliance: 8 Considerations for Choosing SOP Software

SOP Article III of III

Now that we have explored the realm of SOP and regulatory compliance, let’s take a look at the types of features to consider when looking at SOP solutions… READ MORE

Do People or Processes Guide Our Compliance Efforts?
Recently, we’ve been spending quite a bit of time researching what ensures effective compliance programs and translates into lasting corporate cohesiveness. We’ve studied general trends of discussion, attended compliance conferences and consulted upper management groups on their compliance efforts. What is most intriguing is how differently each organization approaches their corporate compliance structures… READ MORE
VIEW SLIDES: 5 Steps to Ensure Compliance with Policies and Procedures
Establishing effective policies and procedures does not begin and end with regulations. It takes the right amount of collaboration and distributive mediums, and the right methods to measure understanding. Here are 5 steps to ensure compliance, and what software features to look for to choose the best possible solution… VIEW SLIDES
Improving Ethical Compliance in the Enterprise
Another impediment to policy making is information flow bottlenecks, where one person or department holds up the entire process by sitting on emails that need to be passed on to others. Bottlenecks occur when someone doesn’t have access to information they need to make a decision, meaning everyone has to wait until the information is located. It can be frustrating and slow to get things done this way… READ MORE
5 Ways to Better Manage FCPA Risk

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) is a federal anti-bribery statute that makes it “unlawful for certain classes of persons and entities to make payments to foreign government officials to assist in obtaining or retaining business,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice website.

The FCPA has been around since 1977, and has received greater attention and increased enforcement in the past few years, leading to increased corporate penalties for violations…READ MORE

SharePoint as a Compliance Tool
According to Microsoft market research, 78 percent of the Fortune 500 companies are SharePoint users. With such an impressive user base, it’s easy to recognize SharePoint as an essential business tool used within most organizations today. When it comes to compliance the possibilities within such an extensive tool are limitless… READ MORE
Beyond the Basics: 5 Traits to Look for in a Compliance Software Provider
As businesses face greater regulatory challenges, compliance management is becoming increasingly difficult. Fortunately, with rapid advancements in technology you can rest assured there will be a solution for the new challenges you face, with solutions for problems you didn’t even know were there. However, selecting a solution takes the consideration of an array of factors, both within and outside of a product’s features, especially in the software industry and even more-so with compliance software… READ MORE

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Analyzing the Benefits of having a Policy Management Software

Now’s the Time to Test Your Policy Management’s Effectiveness

How many of your employees leave scribbled passwords on post-it notes under their keyboards on their desks or taped to the bottom of a drawer? Or, they have confidential information on their laptops, which they take home to work on?

Employees don’t mean to jeopardize the organization’s information security — they’re loyal to the company and dedicated to their jobs, but when they’re focused on the tasks at hand, they often don’t think about cybersecurity threats, risks and potential vulnerable areas… READ MORE

How Compliance Management Software Increases Corporate Transparency
Transparency — it’s a word that’s tossed around quite a bit in conversations, often with the words, “accountability” and “governance,” but what does it really mean? What does it look like? Why is it important? How does it apply to policies and contracts? …. READ MORE
5 Quick Tips to Improve Internal Communications
When you need to communicate new information to employees, it might seem easy to just type up a quick email and send it to everyone in the company. What happens, though, if multiple employees have specific, individual questions and hit ‘reply’? Worse, what happens when they click ‘reply all’ and clutter everyone else’s inboxes? What happens when other employees return to their desks, see the long email chain and automatically delete it without reading your original email? … READ MORE
Tune Up with the Right Tools
A car is made up of many different moving parts. For the car to be efficient and travel from point A to point B, each part must function perfectly and work together. If the parts do not, the car will eventually break down without reaching its destination. In business, there are also many different parts to a company, and for that company to be successful, each part or sector must perform both individually and as a team. Operations in each department must work with an optimal output consistently… READ MORE
3 Ways Policy Management Can Improve Distribution
In today’s world, there’s a policy, along with a huge list of procedures, for everything. More than that, as companies evolve, the policies never seem to remain current for very long before tweaks and updates need to be made. The result? HR, compliance and risk management departments that often fall behind, trying to stay on top of policies and procedures in order to ensure that the company remains compliant with the latest laws and regulations. With policy management software, companies are able to reclaim a huge portion of the time it takes to write, approve and distribute policies… READ MORE
Do People or Processes Guide Our Compliance Efforts?
Recently, we’ve been spending quite a bit of time researching what ensures effective compliance programs and translates into lasting corporate cohesiveness. We’ve studied general trends of discussion, attended compliance conferences and consulted upper management groups on their compliance efforts. What is most intriguing is how differently each organization approaches their corporate compliance structures… READ MORE
Policies and Procedures Distribution: Out with the Old, In with the New
Forget the endless hunt through your inbox and the relentless effort to track down exactly which employees have seen what policies. ConvergePoint offers a simple solution for the distribution of company policies and procedures. Getting the information to the right people no longer has to be a daunting task of its own. ConvergePoint’s Policy Management Software is broken into three portals, so each phase can receive the individualized attention it deserves… READ MORE
Mastering the Audit: Does Your Document Storage Measure Up?
On January 8th, 2013, the American Action Forum published a study stating that the total regulatory burden placed on the U.S. economy in 2013 by governmental regulators amounted to $112 billion. OIRA, The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, then translated this number into the number of hour’s U.S. workers spent processing the regulatory paperwork, 157 million hours… READ MORE
Keeping the Behind the Scenes Stuff Behind the Scenes
Beyond that, when a potential client visits your office or views your company website, the goal is to effortlessly promote the image of a thoughtfully planned & organized well-oiled machine. In the business world, regardless of the industry, one thing can be agreed upon-looking like a well-oiled machine from the outside is far from easy on the inside. As a Compliance Officer or HR Coordinator your role consists of behind the scene work that ultimately creates the seamless, successful image for your company. It takes an extensive amount of behind the scene work to be and stay compliant in today’s fast-paced business market… READ MORE

Supporting a Wide Range of Industries

4 Tips When Evaluating Compliance Management Software Vendors (Beyond Product Features)

Your company has decided it’s ready to take your policy or contract management system to the next level and look into compliance management software vendors. You’ve been tasked with researching and evaluating vendors and products.

Beyond comparing the actual features of the products and price, what else should you look for and ask about when choosing the right partner? … READ MORE

WATCH THE VIDEO: Improve Policies and Procedures Management with SharePoint
On average, do you know how much time you spend searching through shared drives and emails, just so you can find policy documents, discussions around policies and employee acknowledgments? For most people, the answer is much more than they would like… WATCH THE VIDEO
5 Common SharePoint Myths Debunked and Explored
For many business leaders, SharePoint is the elephant in the room. They’ve heard about it, understand that it has many different applications and may have even had some interaction with it via a company SharePoint Intranet. Ask many people what it can do beyond Intranet capabilities, and the misconceptions start to creep in… READ MORE
Why Out-of-the-Box SharePoint Alone Isn’t Good Enough
They’re sometimes some of the first questions potential customers ask us: What’s the difference between ConvergePoint’s compliance management software and out-of-the-box Microsoft SharePoint? Your software is built on SharePoint, so what does your software do and offer that the out-of-the-box functionality does not? Why isn’t what I have now (out-of-the-box SharePoint instance) good enough? … READ MORE
VIEW INFOGRAPHIC: ConvergePoint's Policy Management Software
ConvergePoint’s Policy Management Software leverages your existing Microsoft SharePoint platform and resources, adding robust functionality and more… VIEW INFOGRAPHIC
What Does an Effective Policy Management System Look Like? Just Ask Santa!
How do Santa’s elves build all those toys in the workshop so efficiently? And how do Santa and his reindeer deliver all those Christmas presents to children throughout the world on time, year after year? Leader of the most efficient organization in the world, Santa knows a thing or two about streamlining processes and maximizing productivity. Just like any other well-run organization, Santa’s workshop has policies and procedures that everyone — elves, reindeer, and Mr. and Mrs. Claus included — must follow… READ MORE
Here’s the Secret to Faster, Smoother SharePoint Document Migration
Whether you’re a policy manager, contract manager, SharePoint administrator or another key player in the project team, you know that deploying software and migrating documents to SharePoint will take coordination, planning and training… READ MORE

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Evaluating vendors and software

Financial: Pressure to Cut Costs Leads Banks, Credit Unions to Automate Processes

Today, financial institutions are continually pressured to decrease costs while increasing profitability. On top of these tasks, they must juggle demanding customers looking for faster, more personalized service, safeguarding against cybersecurity attacks and adhering to regulatory compliance standards.

To meet these demands, banks, credit unions and other financial services organizations have focused on creating and improving processes through automation… READ MORE

Healthcare: Alleviate Rising Compliance Costs with Policy Management Software
For small hospitals, large healthcare networks and other medical-related organizations, navigating the ever-changing implementation of the Affordable Care Act can be tricky. Regulations have become increasingly complicated, leading to effective or enforcement dates being pushed back and organizations left scrambling to adjust deadlines and keep up with what’s happening — all in effort to ensure compliance and avoid facing large penalties… READ MORE
Healthcare: 7 Elements of an Effective Compliance Program

Whether your healthcare organization has been prepared for months for its next audit or you’re just getting started, there’s no time to panic or toss in the towel (if your compliance program doesn’t seem up-to-speed yet).

OCR focuses on a few main HIPAA violations, including: failure to conduct risk evaluations of data breaches, ignoring security threats to PHI and poor training of staff in how to protect PHI, according to a recent TechTarget article.

To ensure you’ve addressed the above concerns, hospital compliance officers should keep in mind the seven basic elements of an effective compliance program… READ MORE

Healthcare: 5 Reasons Why CCOs are Critical to Your Organization
One of the seven required elements of a healthcare compliance program is a compliance committee, led by a chief compliance officer (CCO). Though 86% of healthcare provider respondents to PwC’s “State of Compliance 2014” survey said they have designated CCOs, nearly half of those CCOs have other responsibilities outside of managing compliance issues…READ MORE
Healthcare: 10 Signs of an Effective Compliance Committee
You want to ensure your healthcare organization remains compliant with local, state and federal regulations, as well as industry best practices, so you create a compliance committee. Solving potential and current compliance issues — and getting your staff on board with new policies and procedures — is that simple, right? … READ MORE
Healthcare: Perform a HIPAA Risk Assessment in 6 Steps
Healthcare providers and insurers may sigh in relief at the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights’ delays in HIPAA audits, but recent data breaches and cybersecurity attacks suggest that they should not wait in performing HIPAA security risk assessments and reevaluating security reinforcements… READ MORE
HR: 5 Tips to Better File and Email Organization

Going through that stack of papers — other than ensuring they sat on a somewhat neat, yet ever-growing pile — was definitely the last thing on your mind as you skipped out of your office on Friday.

However, a well-thought-out document management system not only eliminates clutter and keeps your office tidy, but it also helps make your job easier (and eliminates time-consuming, menial tasks!) — and for HR professionals and office managers, means the office as a whole runs smoother…. READ MORE

Transportation: Keep Truck Drivers Up-to-Speed on Safety Policies
For trucking and logistics companies, safety and compliance go hand-in-hand. Not only are non-compliance penalties stiff for companies and drivers, but compliance with local, state and federal regulations are part of the foundation of transportation companies’ safety programs. The most successful companies go above and beyond the requirements, as their customers have become increasingly educated on the importance of choosing carriers with strong safety records, knowledgeable dispatchers and experienced, safe drivers to transport their cargo…READ MORE

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