By Joe McKendrick, Lead Analyst

Authoring Policies and Procedures for Modern Workforce

WHITEPAPER

Table of contents

Executive Summary ------------------------------------------------------- 2

Introduction ------------------------------------------------------------------ 3

Where Policies and Procedures Matter --------------------------------- 5

Challenges ------------------------------------------------------------------- 7

Tools and Technologies ---------------------------------------------------- 9

Key Stakeholders in Policy Content Management ------------------- 10

Recommendations --------------------------------------------------------- 12

How Adobe Can Help ----------------------------------------------------- 14

Executive Summary

The Covid-19 pandemic thrusted WFH (work from home) on the global workforce and most organizations had to quickly adjust to the new work paradigm. As existing policies became defunct, organizations had to update their policies and procedures documents to stay relevant for internal as well as external stakeholders. With the pandemic still in play, organizational policies and procedures would keep changing to stay abreast of the ever-evolving scenario. As organizations try to maintain engagement and compliance both among employees and customers, these policies and procedures manuals have never been more important especially for sectors like banking and financial services, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, life sciences and aviation. Business leaders are now forced to think on how to create a content ecosystem which allows them to create and disseminate consistent, accurate, up-to-date, and timely information across channels for all stakeholders.

In this whitepaper, we explore what are the challenges organizations are facing in doing this, what are the tools and technologies involved and how they can be better positioned for the future by adopting evolving content practices around structured content management and content as a service.

2

Introduction

Think back to March 2020 and its immediate aftermath. Most of the global workforce were suddenly sent home to work remotely, essentially making all in-office rules and procedures irrelevant for an undetermined stretch of time. For many companies, there was confusion about proper procedures and guidelines for managing remote workers, and any previous rules regarding work from home addressed small portions of the workforce at most, and therefore were inadequate. Add to that the rapidly changing situations with Covid-19 guidelines that are laying the groundwork for office re-openings. There was no playbook for these events, and companies had to create rules on the fly. How are sick days handled remotely? How are employee grievances escalated?

Likewise, “bring your own device” (BYOD) policies and procedures were usurped with employees working from home. IT administrators’ ability to regulate or support the use of personal devices was weakened, calling for new sets of guidelines.

The Covid-19 crisis was a profound example of how quickly policies and procedures may need to change, often at a pace faster than policy authors and consumers/end-users can adapt. More common events—organizational mergers, management shakeups, technology changes, and market shifts—also necessitate changes or adaptations in policies and procedures. Executives, managers and employees across organizations need to contribute and be kept up on these latest changes.

With the growing complexity of business operations, along with pressure for greater corporate responsibility, policies and procedures manuals have never been more important to today’s businesses. It is critical that employees and managers stay informed on all aspects of operations—such as safety protocols in industries such as aviation, or regulatory compliance in insurance and banking. Needless to say, there has been a significant impact of Covid-19 on the pharmaceutical, healthcare and medical devices industries.

The challenge has been vexing business leaders for decades: policy and procedures manuals have been regarded with dread, disdain, and indifference. These manuals have long been regarded as voluminous tomes that were put on shelves and remained unconsumed. It often wouldn’t matter how outdated parts may have been, as few managers and employees would read them anyway. That was certainly the case when they were issued on printed paper, but even today, with most of this documentation in electronic format, keeping them up-to-date, and error-free–still can be a vexing challenge.

3

Policy and procedures manuals can incorporate a wide range of corporate guidelines and materials, including the following:

That’s why a Componentized Content Management System (CCMS) is critical for today’s enterprises. This system is a constantly changing, indexed compilation of policies and procedures available in a searchable format, It is adaptable across all industries. It enables all enterprise authors and reviewers to quickly access relevant elements and introduce new information, update existing passages, sign off on changes, or remove outdated portions. It provides a way for managers and employees to be able to review guidelines that define their relationship with their companies and the rights and responsibilities associated with their jobs.

• Financial reporting standards

• Accounting standards/principles

• Financial trading guidelines

• Regulatory compliance standards

• Legal guidelines

• Standard operating procedures

• Workplace health and safety guidelines, including Covid-related practices

• Customer care

• Disaster recovery and business continuity

• Employee discrimination or harassment

• Online behavior and technology usage

• Security awareness

• Employee experience/human resources compliance

4

Nowadays, policies and procedures manuals are digitized of course, but assembling and managing these compendiums isn’t any easier than their printed predecessors. Even online, portions need to be updated by their respective business authors from different parts of the organization. Managers and employees need to be alerted to new additions or changes, and employers need to be assured that these are acknowledged and understood.

Policy and procedure systems are essential across all industries, from manufacturing and construction sites focused on worker safety and meeting Occupational Safety and Health Administration mandates, to retail organizations that need to assure quality engagements with customers. These systems provide guidelines or lay ground rules across a range of corporate functions, from technology usage to hiring policies. Key use cases or scenarios that demand comprehensive and agile policies and procedures systems include the following. Note that each requires the involvement of different areas of the enterprise that need to be kept engaged in the consistent and continuous management of the policies and procedures compilation:

5

Where Policies and Procedures Matter

Financial information

The proper handling, dissemination, storage and disposal of pertinent information related to corporate or customer financial data. This is often established by regulatory requirements or industry standards.

Healthcare information

Much of the information generated or shared within the healthcare industry, especially at it relates to patients, is confidential, and must abide by government standards that maintain privacy. This not only pertains to hospitals and healthcare providers, but related industries as well, including insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Manufacturing

Manufacturers need to establish and continually update processes and protocols for a broad range of activities, from product development, product safety, inspection, testing, packaging, supply chain management, supplier selection, supplier relations, and warehousing.

Transportation and logistics

Transportation providers, such as airlines, are subject to strongest rules pertaining to traffic control, vehicle or aircraft condition, maintenance, and certification or licensing requirements of operators, pilots and employees. It is critical that these policies and guidelines are clearly updated and communicated.

Customer care

Guidelines for proper interactions with customers, how to handle escalations in situations.

6

Disaster recovery and business continuity

These policies spell out the processes that business units will take up in the event of a natural or man-made disaster disrupting or cutting off business operations.

Employee discrimination or harassment

Ensuring a fair and equitable workplace for all, from recruiting to onboarding to day-to-day management.

Online behavior and technology usage

Employees have wide access to the Internet and its abundant resources both on and off the job, and with it comes risks. Guidelines on use of online tools and venues within the workplace, how to engage with customers and other employees through social media.

Security awareness

Security is the job of everyone across the enterprise, and corporate policies and procedures will help define the extent of responsibility for security, as well as provide guidelines on the use of corporate and customer data. This also extends to accepted corporate responsibility for training and providing a safe online environment for both employees and customers, as well as guidelines for responding to potential incidents or events.

Employee experience/human resources compliance

Policies and procedures manuals spell out and help cement the agreement between employers and employees, thereby avoiding misunderstandings in the future. The ability to enforce policies relating to failure to meet job performance standards, or prevent bad behavior, is often subject to legal scrutiny. The manual may also spell out working hours and locations, as well as vacation and other time off. This may also include work-from-homepolicies and procedures, which can extend to how data is managed outside of the office, how it is backed up and saved, and what gets returned to the employer in the event of termination. This also provides guidelines for remote access to online enterprise services.

7

Employee health and safety

Workplace safety is a priority that is enforced by law. Policies and procedures help ensure that measures are in place to prevent or mitigate risk. This also now encompasses Covid-related concerns, which relates to the needs of a more dispersed workforce, requiring more remote working procedures, requiring addressing policies and processes relating to that. In addition, for frontline employees involved with direct customer contact, or returning office employees, there need to be guidelines pertaining to health and wellness. This may relate to the sizes of gatherings, spacing between workstations or desks, and mask policies. In addition, ongoing employee health concerns such as smoking and substance abuse may be spelled out, as the health and well-being of employees is a top priority for enterprises, and their ability to manage health risks is essential.

Many companies lack the documentation for policies, procedures, and regulatory compliance content. Even if they exist, these array of documents, content or data that comprise the corpus of policies and procedures works are scattered across various departments, stored as different versions that miss updates and changes, or are maintained in duplicate form. This may have compliance and legal repercussions. Without proper documentation and accessibility of policies and procedures, organizations may be exposed to compliance and legal liabilities, as well as frustrated employees and customers.

The challenges to achieving a well-created and agile policies and procedure system include the following:

Challenges

Incomplete or inconsistent digitization of files or documents

Numerous documents that are essential to the completeness of a policies and procedures compilation may still be paper-based, or in incompatible formats, such as word processing documents. These may even lie beyond the scope of enterprise content management systems, and therefore the ability to view across the enterprise.

8

Lack of collaboration and communication

An inability of enterprise authors to work together will contribute to inconsistencies and overlapping rules. This also results in a lack of awareness of available policies and procedures content. Absence of a seamless review/feedback mechanism between authors and subject matter experts is also a challenge. This affects content accuracy and the ability to push updated content.

Inconsistent versions

When organizations do not maintain or have a single source of truth, different departments may be working with different versions of the same policies and procedures. These may result in inconsistent adherence to corporate policies and procedures. In addition, content may be inconsistent, or even conflicting, across business units and departments.

Slower time to market

Enterprise authors may be unable to deliver and publish updates in a timely manner. Content is being pushed to the market slower than expected—resulting to end-user dissatisfaction.

Employee or stakeholder dissatisfaction

An inability to rapidly resolve organizational or system issues, without access to the latest corporate guidelines, may result in low morale, or worse, legal actions.

Scattered documentation

These may exist in silos that cannot be accessed by enterprise stakeholders.

9

Enables reuse and change management

A CCMS helps manage policies and procedures in modular chunks which can be reused and repositioned. New or revised passages can be readily placed or swapped with outdated. In addition, this plays a role in preserving content integrity with document history and audit trails.

Maintains a single source of truth

Changes can reflect everywhere immediately by updating source content managed in one central location. This ensures content consistency, reduces hassle of managing scattered content, and removes redundancy. As a result, updates to policies and procedures can be immediately viewed across the enterprise.

Opens up content to discovery

Rich metadata available with XML/DITA makes documentation highly searchable and improves search engine optimization (SEO) for easy discovery. This improves user reach across channels and makes content available to users in a variety of formats.

Accessible and searchable

A CCMS provides instant access to relevant guidelines through a secure user-friendly directory or keyword search. These systems may also include reporting tools that ensure compliance and acknowledge of changes or postings of policies and procedures.

Automated

Processes associated with document and updates are managed within an automated workflow that assures all decision-makers and stakeholders are engaged at key points in policies and procedures development.

The features these systems provide include the following:

A CCMS serves as a compilation of files—including supporting documents and checklists—within a searchable, centralized repository that is part of an enterprise content management system. CCMSes are increasingly hosted within cloud, and offer varying degrees of customization and integration with existing content management systems.

Tools and Technologies

Centralized and consolidated

All policies and procedures are maintained and consistently updated within a centralized environment. In addition, CCMSes versioning to ensure all authors are on the same page, as well as providing alerts to and managing exceptions.

10

Scalable

A CCMS is highly scalable. Updated records and documents are accessible to all locations, and any edits or changes are immediately distributed—regardless of workforce size. In addition, the system provides interfaces that enable all documents—even those still paper-based—are converted to a consistent digital format and managed within a workflow.

Secure

A CCMS also ensures greater security for documents, controlling access to designated authors and reviewers.

Meets legal and compliance mandates

Documents are stored and indexed in accordance with mandates and other legal requirements, and are quickly accessible as needed for legal verification or meeting challenges. In addition, e-signatures can be maintained with appropriate documentswithin the system.

There are a wide variety of personas who play key roles in authoring, approving, managing, and delivering policy content in their organizations, across industries. Here are some of the those profiles:

Key Stakeholders in Policy Content Management

CEO and other C-level executives

Executives oversee all aspects of policy and procedures, from workplace mandates to technology guidelines. They set the tone of the policy and procedures manual, and provide high-level guidelines and framework.

Compliance or legal specialists

Members of these teams scrutinize the wording and intent of policies and procedures, and ensure that they are legal, ethical, and meeting the letter of the law. These individuals may also be the authors of the written policies and procedures.

11

Product or service managers

Members of these teams oversee and make recommendations affecting the production and handling of products, as well as outline processes for handling product returns.

Department managers

Managers and line-of-business executives provide on-the-ground feedback to policy and procedures authors. They also ensure that their employees and colleagues understand policies and procedures, and that they are being followed.

HR/employment experience managers

These teams focus on employment practices and processes for handling workplace issues.

Policy administrators

Typically found in healthcare settings, these individuals oversee the creation and distribution of policies and procedures across all settings, and ensure their standardization. These administrators will work closely with clinicians, nursing leaders, allied health leaders, and business administrators to formulate and publish updates.

Supply chain managers

Mainly seen in manufacturing, but also seen in other businesses that regularly depend on networks of suppliers, such as restaurants, these managers oversee all aspects of supplier management and relations, from setting selection criteria to handling discrepancies in orders.

Quality assurance and testing administrators

These administrators need to set standards for delivery of products and services that are error-free and well-designed for superior customer experiences. They play a role in establishing and updating policies and procedures that assure maximum quality in all stages of product development or in service delivery processes.

12

As organizations are ramping up to develop a content ecosystem for creating and disseminating consistent, accurate, up-to-date, and timely information to all stakeholders, business leaders can consider the following recommendations into account.

Recommendations

Identify information assets that exist in silos

This is a long-term undertaking, as important shreds of data and content may be contained within a multitude of systems and repositories across the enterprise. It is important to understand where end-users spend most of their time attempting to locate relevant content. Start with the most severe pain points—such as bringing together documentation from disparate departments and integrate these sources.

Take a design approach, plan the architecture for ease of use

A “design approach” means the user comes first in determining the interface and ability to present requested data or content. The information should be delivered as intuitively as possible.

Focus on a Content as a Service strategy

A Content as a Service (CaaS) approach helps ensure that all contributors have consistent, across-the-board access to content. This cloud-based service layer will provide resources required for technical documentation, as well as the ability to easily create, contribute, reuse, and categorize content. A CaaS strategy provides for a virtual single repository through which content can be standardized and made consistently available across the enterprise. This allows for a front-end authoring and publishing tool that can make it easy to create content for curating by policy administrators, C-level executives and legal/compliance teams.

13

Focus on information architecture and governance

A digital policies and procedure management system needs to be guided by a roadmap that aligns with business requirements, as seen over the coming months and years. There is a need to address integration between various systems, sources, and potentially paper-based sources that still exist across the enterprise. With an architecture in place, information governance needs to be put in place to ensure that solutions and processes meet ongoing business requirements. Information governance also reduces risk by assuring that information reaches the right users, and is in compliance with governmental, industry and company mandates, and is as secure as possible.

Aim for structured content management employing industry standards

Structured content management offers benefits like content reuse, reduced localization costs, and improved search results, which is essential for policy content. An appropriate format be structured around the OASIS Open Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), a standard XML-based architecture for representing human-readable documents.

In the past, policies and procedures were only something that legal and HR specialists could love. In today’s fast-changing environment, however, these corporate guidelines need to be developed with input by all stakeholders across the organization, and well-understood by all. A robust and agile Enterprise Content Management System and a CCMS can help achieve organization’s goal of maintaining a risk-free standards and policy content management. Today’s componentized content systems ensure that these ground rules are easy to compile, easy to update, and easy to understand.

Coordinate with IT and data teams

In many organizations, knowledge teams (mainly concerned with content management) work separately from IT teams. In today’s organizations, data and content (unstructured data) all need to be integrated and brought forward. Assembling an infrastructure that sustains a componentized content system depends on unstructured information maintained in data lakes, for example, requires close coordination with IT developers.

14

XML Documentation for Adobe Experience Manager a cloud native CCMS solution built on the principles of structured content management, can pave the way to efficient manage your policies and procedures. Adobe helps you get maximum returns on enterprise content with this CCMS built for technical documentation, IT and marketing teams. It enables you to scale content creation, minimize content management risks and deliver omnichannel experiences for product documentation, policies and procedures, and long-form marketing content.

You can also author and publish exceptional policies and procedures, regulatory compliance content with Adobe's next-generation desktop authoring tool, Adobe RoboHelp.

To know more about Adobe solutions or get a product demo, visit their website or contact an Adobe expert.

How Adobe Can Help

Join the conversation

Joe McKendrick is a contributing editor and writer to Database Trends and Applications and Big Data Quarterly magazines, as well as lead research analyst for Unisphere Research at Information Today, Inc.

About Author

techcomm@adobe.comFor any queries, write to us at

© 2021 Adobe. All rights reserved.

Adobe, the Adobe logo, and Experience Manager are either registered trademarks or trademarks ofAdobe in the United States and/or other countries.

Adobe Systems Incorporated345 Park AvenueSan Jose, CA 95110-2704USAwww.adobe.com

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter