Policies and procedures are developed to help communicate rules, responsibilities and expectations to employees. But when is the last time you read your company’s policies? Do you know what they say? Are they up to date and still relevant? Have you been keeping up with legislation changes? Do you answer the same employee questions over and over again because the policies are unclear? Having policies in place is a great practice, but just like anything else in the workplace, they need to adapt and stay relevant, or they become not only useless, but non-compliant and frankly confusing to your employees.
At a minimum every company needs to review, sign and post their Health & Safety Policy Statement and their Workplace Violence and Harassment Policies annually. However, management also needs to ensure they are reviewing the rest of their policies on a regular basis to ensure they are up to date. When policies are reviewed and/or revised, this needs to be documented to show your company’s due diligence. If you reviewed a policy and no changes were needed, that’s great, but you still want to document that a review was done. This is what the Policy Review Date is for. As part of an ongoing policy management system, you can also schedule and track the next policy review date so you don’t miss it. When policies are reviewed and changes are needed, the Policy Revision Date should be updated to reflect the date the changes were made.
Have your policies on Systems 24-7? Good news Policy Review Date, Last Revision Date, and Next Policy Review Date can all be tracked on the system for each policy. Even better; if you are a full-service client with Dunk & Associates and have your policies online with us, we can manage this for you! Each month Dunk & Associates monitors legislation changes across Canada. We communicate these changes through our monthly newsletter, and for our full-service clients, we update your policies for you online. In addition, for full-service clients who have agreed to have Dunk & Associates manage their policies, we do an annual review of all your policies to ensure they are up to date. You will see that the Review Date on your policies is updated in January of each year. Any updates that are made to your policies throughout the year will show will be tracked with a Last Revision Date on the system.
Don’t have a system for tracking policy review or revision dates? Contact us at info@systems24-7.com to find out more about what Systems 24-7 can do for you. Or if you have questions about what you should be doing for policies, feel free to reach out to one of our professionals at 1-866-754-8839.