Policy Guidelines

Guidelines listed below outline the key areas and steps to cover to create and ensure that company policy is understood and followed. An effective policy will enable organizational conformance to the business strategy and establish documents and understanding of organization's goals.

#1 - Define a Scope of the Policy

Creating a scope of company policy includes identifying the individuals and processes that are working within the policy and people who are not affected by the policy. The scope outlines actions and impacts that the policy will have on the company. A definition of the scope sets up guidelines for accountability and the individual roles and responsibilities involved.

#2 - Define Roles and Responsibilities

This will clearly specify who and what is privileged. This can be broken down using the Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RACI) model for increased more clarification. This will make sure that employees know their role and can effectively execute their responsibilities.

#3 - Ensure Accessibility

Establishing policy should be available to all employees within a company and is easily accessed. It should be available through an online company website that all employees can access. All employees should receive a copy once they are hired as well as whenever major policy changes are made. 

#4 - Be Clear and Concise

An effective policy should be as short as possible while still covering all important areas within the company. The wording that is used should be simple, clear, and understandable to all employees in the company. Also, avoiding confusing wording and terminology will decrease policy infractions in the long term.  

#5 - Focus on Compliance

IT policy should be matched with standards of compliance that are required in a company. Whether complying with HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, or accessibility rules, a company should ensure to integrate these standards into the policy.

#6 - Enable Accountability

This ensures that a company knows who is involved with a process so that a variety of different actions can be taken. These actions can range from answering questions about a process, offering recognition, and determining the source of problems. Also, accountability makes sure that the needs of a specific process or person are being met.

#7 - Train and Educate

Policy can be changed depending on the changing needs of a company. For this reason, it is necessary to regularly train and educate employees about current policy and impacts on their work. Training will also reduce errors and provide employees with clear understanding of what is and is not acceptable for them to do under the company policy (Taylor, 2001).

#8 - Create Policy Map
This is used by a company that is required to meet the regulations set by the government. Policy mapping indicates the individual rules that require compliance by a company and establishes areas where they need to assure compliance is obtained. Policy mapping is equivalent of a checklist that the company creates to ensure all regulation requirements are fulfilled.