9 Policy Management Best Practices

Some businesses have the habit of creating policies for the sake of creating policies. Instead of achieving the desired result, overzealous policy creation can reduce efficiency and productivity, make compliance more difficult, and lead to more mistakes. Your business can avoid this problem by following policy management best practices. This guide shares pro tips for successfully implementing effective policies.

1. Keep Business Goals in Mind

The purpose of policies should be to improve your operations — not to needlessly complicate processes. Good policies contribute to business growth and help you reach intermediate steps and long-term objectives:

• Correcting problems:Product quality is falling because of unclear and inconsistent manufacturing standards.
• Overcoming challenges: Your business wants to achieve SOC 2 compliance, but there’s no unified push toward it.
• Seizing opportunities:Your team has a great reputation but doesn’t know how to scale operations.
• Avoiding risks: Your company doesn’t have adequate protection against ransomware attacks.

A well-planned policy should be like the blueprint an architect creates for a construction project. It helps you plan your next steps, predict risks, keep workers on the same page, and get excellent results.

2. Set Priorities

Policy management should start with critical issues first. Urgent needs are ones that:

• Get you into trouble with government or industry regulatory bodies
• Hurt your company’s reputation
• Lead to expensive downtime or freeze your operations (e.g., a ransomware attack locking you out of key equipment or deleting client agreements)
• Put confidential business data or customer data at risk
• Lead to the loss of primary customers or government contracts

Consider this: Only 15% of businesses have a high level of cybersecurity maturity. Does your organization have security policies in place for mobile devices or data loss prevention? Prioritize risk mitigation over minor efficiency improvements.

3. Be Consistent

Avoid sending mixed signals to employees. Keep your entire organization traveling in the same direction:

• Once you create a policy, stick with it unless there are urgent and important reasons to change
• Apply disciplinary actions for violations equally, regardless of position
• Use policy templates that have the same format, font, and sections
• Be firm when it comes to accountability for noncompliance
• Train employees to refer to policies and encourage them to ask questions when in doubt

Standardizing policies reduces confusion and helps employees locate relevant information quickly. It also gives you a reliable baseline for setting reasonable compliance goals and tracking progress.

4. Create Clear Policy Management Responsibilities

Policies can only be effective if your organization assigns the responsibility of policy management to someone experienced and trustworthy. Each policy should clearly state who is responsible for creating, implementing, monitoring, and adjusting it.

Having an assigned manager or committee for GDPR or IT security helps organizations implement policies. Instead of shifting blame, make real progress toward compliance.

5. Know The Difference Between Policies, Guidelines, and Procedures

Policies are broad statements of your organization’s position on important matters — requirements with consequences for noncompliance. Policies give your company structure and rarely change. 

Procedures are the methods or processes to implement your policies. Procedures can change frequently, adapting to new technology or updated industry requirements.

Guidelines are recommendations or examples, not hard requirements. Guidelines also change frequently, especially to boost efficiency and productivity.

Don’t create policies for trends. Your policy management should be strong and stable, using flexible procedures to adapt to trends instead.

6. Give Examples

Any good policy should be easy for anyone to understand, from customers to regular workers. Clear guidelines reduce the risk of wasted effort, confusion, and mistakes. Including examples when creating policies explains the direction your organization wants to go in.

Imagine a mobile endpoint security policy that states, “ABC Healthcare requires employees to keep mobile devices secure and in their possession at all times.” But what does “secure” and “in their possession” mean?

Examples help you answer these questions:

• Never leave devices unattended:If you must attend to a patient, take your device with you. Do not leave devices on work desks, tables, or other surfaces.
• Use a lock screen: Make sure your phone has a lock screen enabled that requires a PIN, biometric passkey, or other code to unlock. The lock timer should be one minute or less.
• Sign out: Do not remain signed into the healthcare information system for longer than needed to attend to your patient. Once you find the data you need, log out.

Always clarify any potentially ambiguous language in a policy. If your management team doesn’t understand the policy well enough to provide practical examples, then the procedures need more work.

7. Eliminate Data Silos

Data silos are the enemy of policy implementation. Having different departments create their own policies can even lead to directly conflicting standards. At the bare minimum, you’re likely to end up with needless repetition of tasks. The solution is to create organization-wide policies instead of leaving policy decisions to department heads.

8. Centralize Policy Documents and Compliance Tracking

In the same way, storing records in different places makes it hard for your organization to coordinate operations. Some teams may keep following out-of-date versions of policies without realizing it. A centralized policy management platform helps you avoid this issue. These state-of-the-art tools allow every team in your organization to access, refer to, and follow the newest guidelines. You only have to save changes once and the document gets updated automatically.

9. Get Input From All Stakeholders

How can you make sure policies are realistic and efficient? One way is to get input from your stakeholders before creating them. Executives may look at problems from a different point of view from front-line workers, managers, IT and legal staff, and other departments. Customers may also have different expectations.

Instead of making assumptions, get eyes on day-to-day challenges by asking for feedback on proposed policies. There are usually multiple ways to address issues, and smart policy management professionals care more about the best results than stubbornly sticking with the first proposal.

Automate Corporate Policy Management Best Practices

Tools that let you automate your workflow can reduce the complexity of implementing policy management best practices. Instead of requiring employees to remember to distribute document updates, automation makes sure policy proposals and updates go to the right place every time. Discover Compyl’s workflow automation and centralized document storage features and streamline your policy management right away.