A new poll from a vendor shows that nearly 50% of
I could not find the actual poll results and the company that conducted the poll, NETconsent, does not make it readily available on its website. This sounds like another marketing exercise masquerading as scientific research... but regardless the information is worthwhile.
The marketing states that the “poll reveals that many organisations have a passive and potentially dangerous attitude towards managing their policies. Intranet implementations that grow organically can prove challenging to manage and might no longer meet the increasing compliance requirements for such processes.”
NETconsent highlights the following “dangers of managing policies over the Intranet”:
- No proof – Simply making a policy available for reading on the intranet is not sufficient. In the instance of a legal challenge companies need to demonstrate that an employee has agreed to the policy in question, if not also read and understood it.
- Out of date / inaccurate – Policies need updating on a regular basis. If policies are not kept up to date with company and legislative changes, employees may be reading and agreeing to inaccurate information, leaving the company open to risk.
- Understanding – Without measures to ensure that policies are read and understood, organisations do not know whether their policies are viable and effective.
- Relevance – Many policies will only be relevant to a set group of people. Managing policies through the intranet may make it confusing for employees to identify which policies are relevant to them. Ideally policies should only be targeted at the relevant employees.
- Access – In many organisations not all employees have access to the intranet or use it on a daily basis. This may result in employees being unaware of policy changes or unable to access policy documents.
I believe the use of “danger” to be rather strong here, but I’ll let each reader judge for themselves vis a vis the present intranet environment and culture at their respective organization.
“The research indicates just how many businesses rely on the Intranet to communicate policies,” says Dominic Saunders, NETconsent’s Operations Director. “While it is encouraging that companies are using policies to educate their employees and protect themselves, managing them over the intranet might not be enough.”
“Without evidence of the signed document, employers are leaving themselves open to risk. In the event of a breach of policy, organisations need to be able to demonstrate not only that they have a policy in place but that the employee concerned has seen and agreed to the document.”
How can you tell both lawyers and marketers are involved in this announcement? Fear and legalease can together form a very powerful marketing punch.
I’ve not heard of a company that was sued because each and every employee did not sign-off on an intranet policy. If it’s stated and available through a link on every single page (via CSS template) then that should suffice. I’m not saying that such a lawsuit is not possible, it obviously is possible, but I’ve not seen or heard of one as of yet.
NETconsent is of course raising the possibility of potential lawsuits under some circumstances in order to sell companies their product – which by no coincidence helps “mitigate risks” by maintaining “full and accurate records of written policies.” Fair enough.
NETconsent Ltd. “is the world-leading vendor of effective policy management software solutions and corporate communications.”
NETconsent’s “Tips for better Policy Management” include:
- Ease of use – The more policies that are managed through the intranet the more updates and changes will be required. To minimise the time spent on managing policies by staff it should be easy to create, update, distribute and monitor responses of new and revised policies.
- Updates – Keep all policies updated and current in line with corporate culture, working practices, legal precedents and legislation changes.
- Record agreements – Maintain records of employee agreement to relevant active policies, whilst retaining a full archive of agreements to previous policy versions.
- Access for all – Ensure that all employees, including those that work from home or remotely, have access to central policy repository.
- Control – Make sure that access of ‘author rights’ to policies is tightly controlled and only nominated persons can make changes to policies and policy records.
- Understanding – Randomly test employees’ understanding of policies to determine whether further education or policy reviews may be required.
- Check – Carry out checks to ensure that any required policy agreements can be accessed for evidence at short notice.
About the poll
“The results were taken from a telephone poll of 100
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