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“As a major player in financial services and other market sectors, we have a continuous obligation to raise the bar in effective corporate governance, summarized. That is what PolicyMatter is helping Experian to achieve and that is why we feel confident and positive about meeting our ongoing compliance responsibilities.”
Ian Sirrs,
Director of Risk Assurance, 
Experian Group 

“Our objective when we set out with PolicyMatter was to identify the extent to which it could provide an effective and robust system for the presentation of Group procedures to staff on a regular basis, as well as providing management with clear system of testing and documenting the level of staff awareness. This was what it achieved and it’s helping Julian Hodge Bank continue to pursue its goals of innovation, professionalism and maintaining leadership in our chosen sectors”
Verne Farrugia
Julian Hodge Bank

“Communicating key policies on how we expect staff to use the company’s IT systems is an important issue for Symphony. With PolicyMatter we’ve found a practical way of making this happen across the whole group. We can see at any time who has read the policy, agreed to it and signed up to it. Likewise for staff who may have worked previously in different environments with different cultures, we can help them by making sure they’re fully aware of what’s acceptable within Symphony and what isn’t. For everyone, it’s clear, unambiguous and effective.”
Clare Lindley
Symphony Group

Company Policies that are outdated, misunderstood or simply ignored cause expensive compliance liabilities.

PolicyMatter addresses the issues in measuring policy compliance and distributing policies such as codes of conduct policy, corporate ethics policy, corporate governance principles as well as managing codes of conduct, codes of ethics, corporate policy development, corporate policy measurement, corporate policy distribution and managing professional conduct.

PolicyMatters is a software solution that protects you from compliance infractions by automating the delivery, acceptance & auditing of Corporate Policies ensuring employees have read, understood and signed-up to them. The goal is to make sure that damaging email does not even get written!

An Ounce of Prevention....

A tidal wave of regulatory and security demands has relentlessly driven up the cost of achieving policy compliance. Accountability rules have made individual board members responsible for the actions of their employees. And across the enterprise the responsibilities of compliance and security officers have massively increased. Against this background, senior management has little visibility of policy understanding, acceptance or compliance and no way to demonstrate that a sound Company Policy Distribution process has been implemented. 

Furthermore, to respond to fast changing legal regulations, many corporate policies need to be refreshed more quickly and more often. The traditional method of sending a policy out for signature once a year or pointing the employee to the intranet are insufficient to demonstrate auditability and understanding of the policy or a policy change.

The PolicyMatter rules-engine can be configured to force a user to review and accept a Policy, so consider using it for distributing your time-critical or volatile policy changes and emergency bulletins such as:

• Codes of Conduct
• Audit/Compliance/Risk Management procedures
• Immediate Legal-Hold notifications
• Code of Ethics
• Conflicts of Interest rules
• IT Security, Network, Email & Web Acceptable Use
• Personal Trading/Insider Trading
• Legal & HR Policy Changes
• Anti Money Laundering
• Procurement and Fair-competition 
• Export Procedures
• Gift Rules
• Call Center procedures

People, policies, behavior

Compliance, Ethics, Governance, Regulation, Security. These are the reasons why organizations write policies. But how can you be sure employees have read, understood and agreed to policy? How can you demonstrate policy compliance to auditors and regulators? Posting policies on the intranet, or relying on emails, the staff handbook or training courses leaves them ignored, expensive to administer, and impossible to track.

PolicyMatter software ensures you get the right policies to the right people, that they understand and sign up to them, and that the whole process is recorded and tracked.

Clear, effective presentation

PolicyMatter delivers policies and policy changes to employees at the desktop, either when they login, via an email link or by integrating with your existing infrastructure. They can then read and agree to the policies that relate to their own role and also access their own personal policy library, a store of all the policies they have read and signed up to, or may need to access for future reference.

Policies are mostly presented when a change happens - when a new starter joins, when policy is changed, or if someone changes roles. To save employees from having to read a lengthy policy to find just one new clause, PolicyMatter can present a policy with the change highlighted. Alternatively, you can have a policy automatically re-presented every few months. Or, by integrating PolicyMatter with your email or web content security systems for example, policy can be re-presented to users if they violate the policy

Understanding and awareness: balancing ‘carrot versus stick’

Sometimes you need more than just sign-up. Sometimes you need real understanding of policies. Where that’s the case, PolicyMatter gives you the option of you testing employee understanding with multiple-choice questions on the clauses they’ve just read. If you need to be strict about policy understanding, PolicyMatter helps you do that - re-present employees with a crucial policy and optionally explain right and wrong answers until they show sufficient understanding.. And because we integrate with security products, applications and workflow systems, even deny them access to sensitive parts of the system.

On the other hand if it’s a more collaborative approach you need, that works just as well. Allow employees to give feedback. Give them an extended period of time to read and agree. Or if they don’t show good understanding, don’t lock them off the system, but record their answers, point them to a training page, explain what they’ve got wrong, or send an email instead.

Tracking policy acceptance and understanding.

In the dark as to who’s seen and agreed to policy? With PolicyMatter we automatically provide reports, charts and audit trails. So you can see which policies have been communicated, to whom, who has and hasn’t agreed to or understood them. You can even do this by policy, by groups or by individual. Likewise, if reports show that some policies are less well understood than others, PolicyMatter will highlight who’s struggling. So you just select for training those who need it, rather than everyone.

Shoot the Messenger

PolicyMatter doesn't  just check employee performance. Your Policies themselves can become the focus. Specialized reporting shows you any clauses and questions that are consistently answered incorrectly. It highlights the problem so you can take the appropriate steps and have the clause (or the whole policy) re-presented with improved wording.

No bombarding with paper

PolicyMatter allows you to prioritize the essential policies as critical, high, normal or low, and set timescales within which employees have to read and sign up to them. Don’t have everyone reading policy instead of working, but ration the maximum number of those who’ll receive policy at any one time. Get the most important policies out first, and follow up with the less critical ones at a later stage, perhaps even let employees find their way to other policies over time. Likewise for administrators, instead of chasing after different versions of a policy and frantic liaison with your Intranet team to make sure the correct version is where it should be, let PolicyMatter do all that hard work for you. By linking PolicyMatter into your Intranet, the policies displayed there are automatically updated as they change in PolicyMatter - with no human intervention needed.

Taking back control

Policy communication and management has been a growing issue for many companies for a long time. To date there hasn’t been a solution. There is now PolicyMatter. For the first time, take real control of policy issues. Get the right policies to the right people. Check who’s accepting policy and who isn’t, and demonstrate the rigorous care that today’s unrelentingly regulated environment demands.