Workplace policies are about making sure everyone in the workforce is safe and understands their responsibilities and obligations. They are also about ensuring fairness in the workplace.
Many businesses are bound by laws and regulations, and it is mandatory that employees know about, read, and understand the policies that ensure all regulatory requirements are met. One way and the other, businesses must have a system in place to create and distribute their policies effectively and efficiently. Automated workflows can help.
Ensuring Everyone Is Notified of Policies in a Timely Manner
Thankfully, the days of placing a paper memo into each person’s departmental mailbox are over. Distributing policies and policy changes electronically makes infinitely more sense in terms of resources saved and errors prevented.
Automated workflows can be created to email policy documents to affected workers all at once. They may even be able to interface with the email program to determine if and when the sent emails have been opened so that there is a record of each employee having received the document.
Ensuring Everyone Has Read Policies
It’s not that hard to ensure everyone receives policy documents, but how can you be confident everyone has read them and understands them? One way is to include in policy emails a link for people to follow if they have a question or don’t understand something about a new policy. The link can go to an FAQ page, or open an online form in which employees can ask their questions and ensure they are sent to the right person to answer them.
Some companies ensure that employees have read policies by having them complete a short, simple quiz as proof. These, too, can be administered through a link in a policy email that goes to an electronic form. Once the user passes the quiz, they are marked as having received, read, and understood the policy.
But what about the people who ignore emails? Workflows can also be triggered to deal with those people. For important policies, your workflow could, for example, trigger a login action opening the reminder and form upon login and preventing them from continuing with their normal work until they demonstrate that they have read the policy.
“Triage” System for Policies and Policy Changes
With policies, you must be careful not to inundate employees. Obviously, some are more critical than others, and the most important ones are the ones that can be integrated with automated workflows ensuring employees read and understand them. The use of short quizzes can be reserved for these critical policy documents so as not to take up more employee time than necessary.
The problem with deluging employees with policy documents, and considering them equally critical, is that eventually employees will acknowledge them without reading or understanding them, just to get on with their day. Therefore, it’s important that you know when to use your policy distribution workflow and equally as important, when not to.
The right workflow software will help you create policy workflows that make sense and that can be customized so that the right people receive the right policy documents at the right time. It will also automatically keep records of policies distributed, acknowledgements, and policy quiz results so they can be called up at any time, should a conflict, policy violation, or misunderstanding arise.
PerfectApps is the ideal workflow software for this and countless other business workflows. By allowing users to drag and drop workflow elements into place, PerfectApps eliminates the need for programming while helping users deploy useful, value-adding workflows as quickly as possible. We invite you to watch the PerfectApps demo video. It only takes a minute, and you’re sure to come away with ideas and inspiration about how you can put automated workflows into service to make your business run better.
