Compliance Can Spark Joy, Right?

Put everything in one place. Then, you can see what you have and get rid of what you don’t need. That’s one of the organization methods Marie Kondo uses in her Netflix hit, “Tidying Up.”

Our organizational lives are like a lot of Marie’s clients. Your files are likely stacked up, spilling out or otherwise in disarray throughout your office. Some of you might be thinking, “You haven’t seen my office. I’m positively fastidious.” Well, then, let’s talk about your digital files.

Every organization — every department, even every computer — could use a little digital organization to increase compliance. Especially when it comes to employee handbooks, compliance training and policies and procedures, your employees likely don’t even know where to find the files. If they can find them, they’re probably out of date anyway.

So, let’s put everything in one place to provide employee access, keep it up to date and save your organization money.

Employees Need Access

Your employees forgot whatever it is you told them during onboarding, and they surely don’t remember individual policies regarding their work lives. A lot is on an employee’s mind, especially when he or she is new to a job. Oliver Hardt, a professor of psychology, says a person’s brain forgets in order to remember.

So, your compliance documents and employee handbooks need to be available in such a way that employees can access them quickly – as opposed to shoved in the bottom of a drawer somewhere.

The first step is to make all of your information available in the cloud at employees’ fingertips. With an intranet, you can create, store and manage documents in the cloud, where staff are available to search and collaborate from anywhere, at any time.

Keep Policies Up to Date

Speaking of time, how much time have you spent updating outdated policy information? Probably a lot. And with each new policy iteration, you have to redistribute the updates to everyone. For a lot of companies, this means printing and passing out new copies or writing long emails.

By keeping these documents in one place that’s easily updated and shareable, your employees can find what they need – quickly and in a pinch.

In other words, create your documents in a way that makes them living, breathing documents to be updated in real time. The world runs at the speed of change, where everything seems to be fluid and dynamic. Our policies should be, too.

Save Your Organization Money

Every technology solution should save money. Research from the 2017 Training Industry Report showed U.S. companies spent $1,075 per employee on training — but how much of that was ignored or forgotten?

Here’s an idea that’s been floating around learning and development circles and is recommended by HR industry analyst Josh Bersin: “learning in the flow of work.” Think of it as on-demand learning. Essentially, this means the employee doesn’t remember much from onboarding — like I said earlier — but they don’t have to. They can search an intranet for, say, the policy they need to recall the moment they need to recall it.

Your people need as much help as possible getting up to speed and trained to do their job effectively. Then, once they’re up to speed, they’ll continually refer back to onboarding documents throughout their career, and it could save you if something were to happen, you know, legally.

Spark Joy With an Intranet

In “Tidying Up,” Marie Kondo says the things you keep should “spark joy” (whatever that means to you). When all of your compliance documents are in one place, your employees can access the most up-to-date information, saving you time and money. And that, my friends, will spark joy for any organization.