It is important to have a strategy for developing, communicating and enforcing a set of policies and practices that reflect a company’s standards of acceptable behavior. In today’s workplace, an employer can be held liable for the bad behavior of an employee, especially when that bad behavior affects other employees, clients or individuals.

For example, in order to foster a productive work environment, a strong and consistently enforced policy against sexual and other forms of harassment is key. Harassment that is unchecked has the very real potential to affect operations through decreased morale and productivity and increased employee turnover. Further, it has been demonstrated that legal liability for a hostile work environment can be significantly reduced by maintaining and enforcing internal policies to prevent and deal with harassment.

Similarly, in the area of Data Security and Identity Theft Prevention many laws and regulations (Massachusetts Data Privacy, FACTA Red Flags, PCI, HIPAA) require the development of comprehensive information security policies to communicate to workers the necessity and methods for protecting the personal information of employees and customers and to establish consequences for non-compliance.

The problem, however, is this: Once a policy is written how is it disseminated? How is it managed? How is it used?

It is important not to simply pay lip service to the requirements of developing HR and IT policies and procedures but to make them into useful and useable documents. Instead of printing policies so that they get filed and ignored, firms should post them in a Policy Portal where employees can acknowledge them and have instant access to them for referral purposes and the firm has an audit trail of who has and has not agreed to the policies’ terms and conditions.

In this way firms can truly benefit from the value that the establishment and enforcement of policies can have: Significant reduction of legal liability, improved workplace morale and productivity, and an enhanced reputation as a business that cares about its employees and its customers.