Top 5 areas (plus one surprise) to consider when reviewing your operational policies!
Your organization is dynamic, it changes and adjusts as it grows. Even if you have a long-established business, things still change. You might reorganize staff responsibilities, or you might add or change an application or software. Regardless of what’s going on in your organization, you need to review your policies on a regular basis.
Many times businesses will hold off in reviewing policies because they are just too overwhelmed. Where do you start? What do you look for?
Well, let’s dive in!
Language Review: Look at the policies with fresh eyes (and a red pen!). As with anything, when you look at something long enough, you get fatigued and miss important mistakes. So, take some time to review the policy for typos, wording issues, and grammatical errors. This is also the time to ‘sense’ check the language in your policy. Does the wording make sense? Is the policy outlined in a logical flow? This is the time to make adjustments to clean up your policy so it just reads better.
Policy Alignment: Many times, processes or daily activities will ‘drift’ from their original intent causing a misalignment in the policy. It can be due to ‘shortcuts’ or shadow procedures. This can happen unconsciously or due to a lack of overall understanding of the ‘why’ of a policy. Looking at policy alignment means looking at what’s actually happening in an organization versus what’s in the policy. What’s important when reviewing for alignment is to determine if behavior needs to change or if a policy should be adjusted. Believe me when I say, don’t just assume that behavior needs to change to meet the policy. As time goes on, sometimes the behavior actually makes sense! So approach with an open mind.
Operational Changes: While misalignment within a policy is more of a ‘drift’ that happens over time, operational changes are more purposeful. These are changes that you may have implemented since adopting the policy, but the policy hasn’t been updated to reflect this change. It’s time to adjust the policy to make sure you’re including those things. It could be things like new roles, new software, or even a new way of doing things! It’s important to make sure you capture these changes as they impact the policy.
Important Incidents: As you’re looking over your policy, think back to any near misses, important incidents, or other ‘oh crap’ moments. Were any of them due to gaps in your policy? Is there something that isn’t properly addressed? Now’s the time to determine how to address it in your policy. However, be careful that you’re not trying to cover all possible scenarios as you’ll make your policy too detailed and impossible to follow. Instead, consider what’s likely to happen again and what damage you’ll need a policy to prevent.
Forward Looking: Now that you’ve addressed everything that’s currently it’s time to think about the future of your organization and how you’d like a policy to reflect it. What changes are you making to operations? Are you looking at increasing or changing vacation time? Do you have new employee fringe benefits like working from home or flex time? As you’re updating your policies it’s a good time to consider adding them in.
The Surprise—
Create an Implementation Plan: Finally, it’s time to educate your organization on the updates in the policy. How are you introducing these changes? Having a plan of how and when you’re going communicate these changes to the organization is imperative. Also, consider if there will be any pushback on changes and how you will address those because it’s possible that you might have some detractors with policy changes. However, it’s important to resist the urge to ignore these concerns in favor of avoiding conflict, but instead, be ready to explain the why and what of material changes to a policy.
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