Finding the Best Policy Management Software for Your Company

Changing market dynamics has forced businesses to form the right policy which could be implemented flawlessly and also adhered to. Without a strong policy, a company would find it difficult to adapt to new situations or may find itself entangled in legal hassles and cost overruns. A good policy should be able to govern business as well as operational aspects such as the use of company assets, employee behavior or data protection. Traditionally policy management is done manually but it has its own sets of problems like to ensure employee access and most importantly the implementation of the updated version.

Good policy management softwareaddresses such pain points and helps to create, review, approve and store policies. It also enables the proper implementation of the policy by sharing the policy with relevant employees or stakeholders.

One needs modern policy management software to resolve several issues. Traditional ways of policy management have their own set of challenges as mentioned below.

1. Not precise- Traditional ways of policy management lead to confusion and don’t give precise information as everything is done manually.
2. Poor attention span- As the policy is more about legal representation than it is for employee engagement it has a low attention span, thereby leading to poor implementation. It often has too many jargons which are difficult to understand.
3. Lack of engagement- Traditional policy management is not engaging enough for employees which leads to guesswork and poor understanding of policy.

1. Tracking and implementation- It's difficult to track and implement policy as company management has to generally depend on supervisor’s feedback which is generally unquantifiable.

Due to the above-mentioned lacunas of managing a policy traditionally, modern policy management software becomes critical as it ensures proper policy formation, implementation, and monitoring. Simply put a management software is a web or cloud-based application that allows a user to organize, circulate, edit and implement policy documents efficiently.

Below mentioned are some of the key features one should consider while choosing a policy management software.

1. Policy creation- Good policy management software should have functionalities that allow you to write, edit and approve policies from within the tool. It should also ensure that right set of people have access to documents and the workflow.2. Search options- It should have features to search a keyword and provide all matching results. It should be able to search policies by title, author, and metadata or within a particular folder or Drive.

3. Consistent workflows - It should offer templates and consistent workflows to help you design accurate policies that could be reviewed, edited and approved easily.4. Version control - It should also have robust version control to avoid duplicity and outdated policies.

5. Access controls - Software should also have features to provide appropriate access to the right people and should have controls as to who can view, review or edit policies.

6. Time-saving - A good software should be able to centralize all policy databases and should be able to quickly access information whenever needed thereby resulting in saving time.

7. Reporting - Software should also be able to provide a centralized view of policies and updates through reports and dashboards to all relevant stakeholders.8. Acknowledgment - Good policy software should have features for employees to digitally sign and agree to a particular set of terms. It should also be able to track policy distribution and its compliance.

9.Integration - The software should be able to easily integrate with other software such as SharePoint, office 365, etc. Integration with tools like Microsoft Outlook can help in the sharing and implementation of policy documents.

10. Affordable- Choose policy management software that fits into your budget while fulfilling your business needs. Most of the software’s today are cloud-based and also have excellent support mechanism.