These days, enterprises in high-risk industries like banking and insurance must have some way to manage these risks while also taking precautions to protect their reputation and mitigate the possibility of huge non-compliance fines. An automated policy management system that allows for quick regulatory and compliance updates, provides tools for easy policy dissemination and offers a single source of truth for all content can help minimize your exposure to risk. Policy management simplifies your audit and compliance procedures, but that’s just one reason you should implement a policy management system. Here are five others.
Streamline Workflows
A manual policy management system is rife with possibilities for error. Paper policies can be lost or damaged, resulting in longer roll-out times and incomplete approval processes. An automated policy management process allows you to digitize the entire policy process from creation to review, to approval and keep everything in one place. No longer will you need to hold meetings to ensure all employees review and acknowledge new policies and you won’t have to track down those employees who don’t return their signed copies either.
Streamlining your policy management workflow will free up your time to focus on other aspects of your company. You can implement policy updates effortlessly and make edits to existing policies with ease. All versions of your policies will be automatically saved for audit purposes and to ensure you’re disseminating the right version to your employees at all times.
Regulatory Reporting
High-risk industries such as finance and insurance are required to provide evidence of policy compliance to various regulatory agencies either at specific intervals or upon demand. Having your enterprise’s policies available in one place with a draft record makes providing these reports to your governing bodies seamless. You can respond to audit requests quickly and make your compliance records available to your auditor, allowing you to avoid costly fines and penalties.
The key to effective policy management in terms of regulatory reporting is that all your company’s policies are in one place. You don’t have to track down policies from every department to ensure the auditor has the most current versions and you don’t have to worry about missing anything that could lead to non-compliance. A single policy management system ensures that all pertinent documents are accessible upon request in the event of an audit.
Risk Management
Even though your employees are your greatest asset, they also represent the biggest threat to your enterprise’s reputation. The main reason policies are necessary is to ensure everyone is on the same page about what is required of them to be in compliance with all the regulations that govern their work. With the rapid pace at which regulations change in high-risk industries, it’s critical that you’re able to create and disseminate accurate policies at a moment’s notice. The only way to do this effectively is to have an automated policy management system that provides complete control over all policies and their adoption.
The first goal of policy management is to get everything in one place so that a single entity can oversee the policies of all departments. When everyone is creating their own policies and keeping them in different systems, you can’t even begin to know if everyone has the knowledge they need to be in compliance with the regulations that affect their work. By originating all policies from a single system, storing them in a single location, and using a single adoption workflow, you can ensure that everyone affected by a new policy is informed and compliant.
Targeted Dissemination
As you’re aware, not every policy generated in a company applies to every single employee within that organization. There’s no need for everyone to know every single policy when they don’t affect their work in any way. An automated policy management system allows you to determine which employees should receive which policies. You can also implement required training materials that are necessary for policy compliance within the system to ensure all employees can demonstrate their understanding of a policy when necessary.
Effective communication and dissemination of policies throughout large companies has traditionally been a challenge. Not only does someone have to make sure all the right people have the policy in hand, but they also have to make sure everyone signs the policy by a specific date and fully understands the policy and its impact on their work. Attempting to perform these tasks manually is a huge time waster when you can use an automated system to track policy acceptance. You can also send out reminders to employees to complete the policy training and acceptance procedures by a specific date.
Collaboration
Employees often demonstrate better policy compliance if they have had a hand in creating the policies. Of course, not all policies originate within an organization (such as regulatory policies), but those that do are usually better received if employees have input into their creation. A policy management system allows multiple users to collaborate on a document in real-time so that employees who have a stake in compliance can contribute to policy creation.
An automated policy management system will track all changes that are made to documents so that nothing ever gets lost or permanently removed in case a change needs to be reverted. You’ll have complete insight into all policy creation, which can provide you with better understanding of what your employees value. Policies are integral to your enterprise’s culture, so knowing how your employees engage with policies and their creation can help you establish a culture of collaboration and compliance.
Conclusion
Companies in high-risk industries simply can’t afford to take risks with their policy management system. They need to have a formal, automated system that ensures that all policies can be tracked from start to finish and edited or altered whenever new regulations come down. Don’t let your reputation be ruined because you didn’t take a proactive stance on policy management. Automate your policy processes now to avoid fines, penalties, and other headaches in the future.
