Jodie Flowerday, a Policy Advisor working in the New Zealand tertiary sector, discusses her tried and tested tips for writing compliance documents, in the conclusion to her series on policy drafting. Read Jodie’s previous articles about policy drafting: Best practice drafting guidelines, When policy is necessary and Compliance document categories.
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I have written a few articles on policy over the last few months. This article looks how to draft these documents and what I have found to be key elements and lessons learned when drafting compliance documents (policy, framework, procedure, processes etc.) for my institution.
Background
Document review and drafting advice is one of the skills lawyers both in private practice and in-house may be called upon to give. My role is dedicated to providing drafting guidance and there are other similar roles throughout my industry. Given my institution has a dedicated role for this, this has given me an advantage in creating value around my work. However, even if a dedicated role exists don’t be surprised if you have to work quite hard to get engagement with your colleagues because this is not automatic, just because a role exists.
General principles
How to write an effective compliance document will be organisation-dependent to a large degree. Each organisation might have different ideas on what to call different compliance documents and when they are needed, but there are a few principles that can be broadly applied to ensure your statement is fit for purpose.
I personally found information on drafting legislation by the New Zealand Parliamentary Counsel Office a very helpful resource. Some principles work well for internal compliance documents. Several tips are below:
1. Identify what the document needs to achieve; what are its desired outcomes? This can be set out in a purpose section with key drivers such as legislation, regulation or best practice.
2. Identify who the audience/s of the document will be and write for them. Avoid making the document academic, make it practical and relevant to its audience/s.
3. Use headings and sub-headings to organise your content. This also helps decide what content is actually needed.
4. Keep tone, language and terminology consistent throughout the document.
5. If working in house, find ways to educate those within your organisation who might benefit from guidance on this. This helps identify you as someone who people can talk to about drafting and illustrates that you have practical solutions to drafting problems. Use an internal group that has an extensive contacts list and has good attendance rates for their presentations to help promote sessions you want to have.
Knowledge v Readability
It is important to remember that people can know the subject matter really well, but that doesn’t always translate into drafting a document in a way that clearly communicates what people need to know – that is a different kind of skill. Some of the documents I have reviewed clearly identify the compliance requirements, but in a way where only the people with the same level of knowledge (usually very few) would likely be able to understand what it means for their work streams.
You can easily unintentionally imply that the person working on the document who may know the subject matter very well, actually doesn’t based on the feedback you provide. So, it’s best to build up a good rapport first by acknowledging their expertise on the subject and being diplomatic and as delicate as possible when you pose questions or make suggestions.
Compliance “a dirty word”
Talking to peers from another institution recently, compliance can be viewed as a dirty word. The value an organisation places on compliance documents in achieving strategic and operational goals and ensuring compliance requirements are properly understood, can be underestimated or underappreciated.
Bad experiences with compliance in the past can colour the level of importance given to them. This in my view, is likely to occur if a compliance document is only used to point out the things someone has done wrong, and not using it to reinforce positive behaviour. So, if you find that when you talk about anything to do with compliance there’s not a lot of interest or engagement, this may be due to the perception that compliance is a barrier rather than gateway to getting things done.
Conclusion
Make sure you do the work to get people to understand why compliance documents matter and, the positive effects they can have at different levels of your organisation. This might mean you need to advocate and educate within your organisation on their relevance, importance and implementation in addition to making improvements to their content and format.
Jodie Flowerday has been working in various roles since 2011. She currently works in the tertiary education sector in the role of Senior Policy Advisor for a tertiary education institution. Contact Jodie at Jodie.beker@gmail.com or connect via LinkedIn
