An automated policy management solution has greater benefits than a printed Personnel Handbook.
- Central Repository
- More accurate & up-to-date policies
- Better risk management
- Increased visibility of policies
- Easier Maintenance
- More Responsive for time critical policy updates
- Reduced costs
- Automated notification of new and revised policies
- User consent audit trail
- Real-time management reporting
- Simple archiving & retrieval
- Higer standards of compliance
- Greater legal protection
- Ability for more frequent policy reviews
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Central Repository
Paper: If policies are sent out individually there is no central repository for employees to refer to.
If a manual or handbook is used, a central repository exists at the time of publication, however it may become quickly out of date and fragmented. As legislation, culture and risks change, updates may get circulated via a different means and the validity of the central repository becomes diluted.
NETconsent: Users can access all the policies they have ever been presented with at any time. (current and old versions).
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Accuracy
Paper: It is impossible to ensure that circulated addendums are added to the existing manual (unless only one or two copies exist). Therefore employees may be accessing old incorrect information and putting themselves and the organisation at risk.
NETconsent: Employees are always presented with the latest policies which are relevant to their role each time a policy is revised. This ensures that users are immediately aware of changes, which helps to minimise risk.
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Risk Management
Paper: Often employees are instructed in their contract of employment to abide by corporate policies, however often they do not become aware of these policies until some time into their employment.
NETconsent: Proactively presents policies and prevents use of specified IT services (Network, Internet or Email) until a user has agreed to an organisation’s policy. This ensures employees are aware of their rights and responsibilities before using corporate resources.
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Visibility
Paper: Users are required to choose to review a paper policy. Whether located centrally or sent to them directly, paper is something they can indefinitely set aside for more pressing tasks.
NETconsent: Proactive in its presentation of policies to users.
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Ease of Maintenance
Paper: It is not very practical to send out tailored policies, so in most cases all employees receive all the policies even if they are not relevant and often assume that some restrictions do not apply to them based on their role in the organisation.
NETconsent: Policies can be customised so that users get the policies that are relevant to them. There is no room for ambiguity about which clauses do and don’t apply to them.
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Responsiveness
Paper: Updates take time to print and post. Where new policies come into force from a particular date the policy has to go out before that date, so two policies may appear to contradict themselves.
NETconsent: Provides a reliable mechanism to quickly update policies and distribute them without additional costs. Time sensitive policies are guaranteed to present at the right time.
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Cost
Paper: Each policy update incurs production costs and possibly postage dependant on employee locations.
NETconsent: Pays for itself during the roll out of the first policy to 500 people. Subsequent updates incur no additional costs.
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Notification
Paper: Notifications of new or revised policies can be sent by letter, email or staff notice board, etc. However there is no guarantee that employees will review new or revised policies.
NETconsent: New or revised policies which are relevant to the employee are automatically displayed at the point of use, so receipt is guaranteed.
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Consent
Paper: Ensuring that users sign to say that they have agreed to be bound by corporate policies is a labour intensive exercise. It is impractical for large organisations, particularly if they have remote locations with no HR function to rely on line managers, telephone and email chasing to get the signed policies back.
NETconsent: A user has to accept the policy before using the services that are affected by the policy. This eliminates the need to chase users for their responses. At any time HR can easily see who has accepted or declined a policy or not yet seen it.
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Reporting
Paper: Collating the responses and filing them is a time-consuming exercise. Management reports have to be created manually.
NETconsent: Maintains a full audit history of policy publication, circulation and revisions. Every user acceptance is recorded against the various policies and versions they accepted or declined. Management reports are generated with ease.
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Archiving & Retrieval
Paper: Loss of paper records can invalidate a disciplinary procedure.
NETconsent: A computerised system is backed up for disaster recovery.
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Compliance
Paper: Demonstrate good corporate governance. Logistics of establishing where the process is at any given point is not practical as it result in a huge overhead.
NETconsent: Policies and procedures are in place and effectively communicated throughout the organisation. Rapidly allows you to pull compliance reports about who has been presented with policies and who has accepted and or declined them.
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Legal Protection
Paper: Unless a very stringent process with unlimited resources is in place, organisations find they rarely get all paper policies returned. This runs the risk that if taken to an Industrial Tribunal, the case may be thrown out, as the employer is apparently not treating everyone the same.
NETconsent: Applies the same processes to everyone, so that the organisation can not be accused of giving preferential treatment to some user. There is the flexibility to distribute tailored policies to specified groups of personnel where policies are legitimately applied differently.
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Review Frequency
Paper: Because a paper policy process is so resource hungry, policy reviews tend to be undertaken on an annual basis. This leaves the organisation open to conflict of actual practice verses a policy directive, which increases risk to an organisation.
NETconsent: It is so easy to publish new policies that it promotes frequent review and update of policies. Policies therefore afford greater protection to the company as they reflect the current position in terms of legislation and standard company policy.
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For more information or to arrange an online demo:
Telephone +44 (0)870 013 1600
Email: info@netconsent.com