Answer: You write it together.
If a policy isn’t properly understood by those that it applies to, then there is little chance that it will be effective or implemented correctly.
Like most organisations, Life Change Care Limited have a great deal of policies and procedures that cover a wide range of aspects of the business.
With so many policies, it can be difficult to remember all of them.
In fact, it would be natural for therapeutic care givers to pay more attention to policies concerning safeguarding than IT and data during their induction and beyond.
However, the correct use of IT and data is fundamental to the way that many companies including ours operate. Particularly given the confidential nature of much of the data that we process on a day to day basis.
Therefore, to give the team a greater sense of ownership, we arranged a series of workshops to develop a new IT and data storage policy.
Over a number of weeks, the whole company has been split into small groups who each attend a workshop. During the workshop, aspects of the new policy are discussed, and over time, we are building a new policy comprising a collection of “dos and don’ts”. Each of which is reinforced with an example of “why” they should or shouldn’t do something.
Each workshop discusses the outputs of the previous group and then adds more of their own.
By the time that all of the workshops have been attended in January 2022, we will have written a more effective and relevant IT policy, that is fully understood by the whole company. And because of the collective ownership, is far more likely to be effective.
