Once you have defined what your anti-bribery plan is and created your bribery act policies and guidance, the last step is the most important! Now you are ready to distribute your policies so that associated persons actually read and acknowledge them. This last step is easier than you think using DocRead for SharePoint.
The next steps outline how to do this using DocRead (assuming that it has been installed and configured by your SharePoint Administrator).
Upload your anti-bribery policies to a document library
Upload your policies and guidance documents into a SharePoint document library. These policies can take many forms, for example they could be a word document, pdf, infopath form or even a highly interactive customized web page (aspx), containing a video and survey.
Distribute your anti-bribery policies
More often than not, you will want all employees to read your anti-bribery policies; in this case, you would simply select a SharePoint audience (or group), that represents all of your employees. However, as your organisation changes, you may, for example, partner with a third party contracting company who would also need to comply with your organisational anti-corruption policies. In this instance, you would either use an existing audience, or create a new one that includes the third party users*.
Once you have targeted the users who are required to read the anti-bribery policies, you must also specify the number of days that they are given to read the anti-bribery policies. Once this date has passed, DocRead will flag the task as overdue and email reminders will be issued. We recommend that you give at least 14-28 days for users to read the documents, especially if you have a few!
Users read and acknowledge the document
Users need to follow a simple process to complete a reading task. DocRead webparts are provided so you can add reading task details in very conspicuous parts of your intranet. The webparts could be added to a home page or mysite page for example, so your users see them as soon as they log onto the intranet - it's completely up to you. If you don't wish to use webparts, users can view their reading tasks by navigating to the relevant DocRead enabled library containing the policies.
Once a user clicks on a reading task they need to open the policy, read it carefully and then self-certify by checking a box to confirm that they have completed the task. It couldn't be simpler! Once the task has been completed, each user can view and save a certificate, proving that they have completed the task.
DocRead securely stores a reading certificate of who, what and when
As detailed in the previous section, after completing their reading task each user is sent a reading certificate which is also stored within DocRead. This gives you proof that you issued the documents and that your employee confirmed that they have read and understood them. This can be really important to prove that your procedures were 'adequate'.
How to track that users are reading and understanding your Bribery Act documents
In an ideal world, all your employees will read and confirm they understand (effectively self – certifying) your policies within hours of receiving a read request. In the real world, we all know that this isn’t usually the case!
DocRead will help you achieve complete confidence that all of your employees have read and understood your Bribery Act policy documents. You can choose how long you want to give your employees to read the documents; Should this time elapse, users who have not yet completed the reading task will be sent an automated email reminder, which will be flagged as overdue in their reading lists. DocRead also offers a comprehensive set of reports that allow you to view the overall status of all your Bribery documents and allow you to drill down to see exactly which users have not completed their reading tasks.
Remember, all it takes is one employee to exhibit corrupt behaviour and your organisation could be liable to prosecution.
Hopefully this post details how you can use DocRead to help provide a defence. If you would like to speak with one of our sales consultants, please email us at sales@collaboris.co.uk
