How to manage policies

As the person in charge of the company's policies, you need to have an overview of all your organization's current and archived policies and other governing documents to work with them and keep track of their validity. This is primarily done by having a policies & procedures organizer where you manage the policies, and their validity, where you add specific documents (typically in pdf), and where you also publish documents to your employee policy portal. 

Once you have all your policies, work procedures, or manuals under control, you can publish them through the portal and make them available to your employees.

As a policy administrator, you work with:

• Organizer of policies & procedures (or manuals, as appropriate)
• Policy settings
• The employee policy portal

The first steps of the Policy Manager

Your work starts with the policies & procedures organizer. The same procedure applies if you need to deal with manuals, instrument, and asset documentation; we recommend using or creating a special organizer for such documents. The recommended procedure for a policy administrator or manager is as follows:

1. Set up policy records

• Use a policies & procedures organizer that can be adapted to the needs and practices of your organization
• Decide what information you will keep on the policies and, if necessary, adjust the structure of the policies 
• Decide for which areas you will keep internal regulations and adjust the categories of policies accordingly 
• TIP: Don't keep more information around policies than you need. Delete what's unnecessary

2. Fill in the policies & procedures organizer

• Once you are clear about the structure of the documents you are keeping, you can fill in the policies and procedures organizer
• Prepare an Excel sheet with a list of policies and the information around them and import it into Aptien
• Prepare a list of valid documents (we recommend straight pdf) upload the documents and set them as published

3. Set up a policy portal for employees

• The policies need to be published to employees and communicated well. This is done through the policy portal, where all documents are available to employees
• We recommend starting on the portal with a list of policies available to all employees. Here you will see all the attachments (PDFs) that you have set as published in the policies organizer

4. Setting up the distribution of policies

• Documents for which you need or have to prove that a specific employee has read them are sent out using the distribution lists in "Policy settings".

Employee's point of view

• Employees only use and see the Policy Portal
• All published documents are available there
• For documents where you have to prove you have read them, use the "Documents to confirm" tab in the Policy portal
• Employees are then notified of unconfirmed policies and documents

Documents other than policies

• For example, if you also have manuals, we recommend using a separate manual organizer.
• If you have other controlled documentation, set up a new organizer according to what you need. 

Summary of directive management in Aptien

• Policies & procedures organizer as a central place for all policies in the organization
• Here you keep track of policies, monitor their validity, and perform maintenance
• The policy portal is a place where all employees can see the policies
• You create and approve directives outside of Aptien