Good policy management is critical to any organisation.
Company policies establish the right values, processes, relationships and behaviour within an organisation. A lack of proper policy management leads not only to a muddied company image, but also wasted resources, excessive emails and paper trails, and a lack of accountability within the organisation itself – potentially to your regulatory or legal detriment.
These issues are extremely common, but they don’t have to apply to you. In this article, we’ll review how Microsoft SharePoint could be a vital tool in your policy management toolkit.
Reasons For Using SharePoint As A Policy Library
SharePoint is a web-based application that integrates with Microsoft Office 365 applications by default. It’s commonly used as a document management system, with its highly configurable nature making it a useful application for centralising company data. Many companies use SharePoint as a centralised company intranet for communications, but document libraries inside SharePoint are also ideal for storing company policies.
SharePoint Provides A Single Source Of Truth
No organisation should find itself in a position where its staff are juggling multiple document versions or losing vital information due to a lack of organisation. Effective version control inside SharePoint avoids unnecessary duplication and ensures documents can be easily shared and collaborated on, even across multiple departments.
Important Policies Can Be Easily Accessed By All
Using SharePoint as a policy library allows local copies of a document to be synchronised on multiple devices without the need for a connection, while integrations with the wider Microsoft platform make it easy to integrate your policy library with other company channels.
SharePoint Simplifies The Policy Reviewal Process
Ongoing maintenance of your company policies is a lot easier with SharePoint. Policies can easily be kept up to date with clear ownership roles and metadata to outline the types of policy and impacted departments. Notifications provided by SharePoint alert policymakers if changes are made. And review dates can be added to all policies held in SharePoint, prompting owners to review or amend documents ahead of relevant anniversaries.
It Makes Audits A Lot Easier
A revision history gives you a complete record of all updates and document revisions. Not only is this useful in terms of accountability in providing a more transparent workflow, but it can also be used by external regulators and other third parties to check that robust policy management processes are in place.
Akita has developed SharePoint as a policy library for a range of organisations and to great success. For more information or to arrange a demo, please get in touch:
