Use Case: Handling Employee Questions with Policy Management Automation

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Today’s mostly top-down approaches to answering employee questions about new policies? They lack flexibility and efficiency.

Today’s policy and procedure management solutions are highly effective for distributing new policies across an organization. And it’s to be expected that upon receiving a policy or procedure update, employees may have questions regarding one or more elements of the new policy about which they’d want to consult the organization’s legal team.

Ideally, there would be a native avenue of communication through which employees could easily initiate such an exchange. Yet because most conventional policy management systems are broadcast-oriented, and can’t support two-way dialog, many organizations turn to email to support exchanges between employees and legal

Yet one-to-one email is not ideal, either, as it would not necessarily preserve those potentially significant conversations in an easily accessible, auditable format.

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Challenge: Preserving legal communications

Addressing the legitimate concerns around the implementation of new policies and procedures is important to maintain compliance with numerous regulations. Just as important is logging and preserving those employee inquiries and legal responses in order to facilitate audits or regulatory review.

It does the organization little good to maintain compliant processes if compliance officers can’t readily document those efforts to regulators. Supporting frictionless capabilities to easily handle policy disclosure and exception handling issues such as legal questions remains a primary challenge facing policy management solution providers today.

Solution: TAP + PolicyHub

Mitratech is now coupling its best-in-class policy management solution with comprehensive, feature-rich workflow automation and compliance tracking to facilitate seamless, auditable legal question exchanges and resolutions.

By combining the advanced workflow capabilities of TAP with PolicyHub’s flexible policy management features, we’re making it possible to communicate and document policy exceptions throughout the entire organization, and then also support two-way legal inquiry/response threads.

Flexibility is key for fitting a solution within organizations’ existing environments. Therefore, we provide the Policy Management solution and workflows as complete standalone capabilities.

This type of approach ensures that policy and legal teams can accommodate the full range of legal enquiries while shaping their policy management infrastructure to best suit their own circumstances.

For instance?  An update on GDPR policy might elicit specific questions from the marketing department on how to shape outbound communication on data processing practices, while the same update could prompt legal questions from IT on data storage requirements. Having in place a flexible solution to field and support all such exchanges is critical for compliance going forward.

The benefits of coupled solutions

Combining TAP’s automated workflow capabilities with PolicyHub’s powerful features creates a flexible and modular single-vendor solution that delivers a range of positive outcomes:

  • Providing a single native communication channel within the policy framework enables immediate conveyance of employee questions, and provides for contextual responses.
  • Tracking legal questions and responses to policy updates in a central system gives you the granularity to easily document compliance to auditors, regulators, and authorities.
  • Automation of manual processes – including logging, processing and resolution of questions, exceptions and disclosures – drives significant ROI.
  • Reporting dashboard and analysis features make it possible to quickly review exception events, and track overall exception handling processes holistically, providing a single source of truth.
  • Intuitive built-in tools ensure policies and exceptions are efficiently managed and enforced, while accurately maintained, distributed, and attested to.

This article on legal question handling has been our fourth, and final, post on policy disclosure and exception handling, and Mitratech’s emerging hybrid TAP + PolicyHub solution to these challenges. Look through our previous installments in the series for use cases on Gifts & Entertainment, Conflicts of Interest, and Policy Exceptions.

Other risk & compliance resources that might be useful:

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