Employee Policy Management
Imagine
you are the HR manager of a business of between 50 and 50,000
employees. For every employee who works for the business, there
is a requirement for them to accept specific policies as a condition of
employment. Policies could include IT usage guidelines, Health
& Safety, Travel policies... – the list goes on. The normal
procedure is to give each employee (let’s call him Employee X) a copy
of the policy for him to read, sign and hand back. Unfortunately,
the only thing this proves is that Employee X knows how to sign his
name! It is very unlikely he will read and fully understand the
policy as there is no control in place to confirm this.
Fast-forward 6 months – Employee X is taken to hospital with a crushed
foot. The conversation goes something like this:
H&S Manager: “What happened?”
Employee X: “I dropped a lead weight on my foot”
H&S Manager: “Were you not wearing safety boots”
Employee X: “No – I didn’t realise I had to”
H&S Manager: “But when you started employment with us, you read and signed our Health & Safety policy
which clearly states you must wear safety boots on the shop floor”
Employee X: “Ah yes, but I didn’t actually read it... I just signed it and gave it back to you”
So
the problem here is that there is no proof that the employee actually
read the policy. Add to this the fact that there could be 6
policies the employee needs to sign up to – where is the value with a
policy system that is flawed? Additional compounded problems that
make the life of the HR manager a misery are the effort needed to get
just 100 employees to sign up. Within a week, 20% will sign, with
the remaining 80% needing 2 or 3 phone calls and e-mails to sign.
20% of those will say they have lost it and can you send another policy
and 10% will deny ever receiving it. And then, multiply this by
the number of actual policies they need to sign up to and this is a
significant amount of work. This doesn’t take into account the
effort needed to simply issue a policy amendment.
We
are able to drastically improve on this process demonstrating a very
quick return on investment. Employees are prompted as they log
onto their computer to read the policies that are waiting for
them. They are given 2 weeks to accept, so if they have an
exceptionally busy morning, they are not forced to read and accept
policies before they can start work – they can defer this for a number
of days. They are periodically reminded of this and if they
have not signed up within the 2 week window, access is denied.
All the user needs to do is read the policy on the screen. After
they click Accept, they are given a very short test to confirm their
understanding of the salient points. Passing this test proves
they did actually read and understand. If they fail the test,
their attention is drawn to the paragraphs they failed on. They
can then start work. The following day they will be re-tested and
when they pass, they are no longer prompted. We are also able to
deliver this to periodic/non IT users through e-mail or kiosks.
Management reports can be generated which shows the degree of policy
acceptance within a business and highlights policy areas where users
are struggling with policy wording – this may highlight a policy
wording problem or a training requirement.
