Renewing policies ensures that your organization’s compliance framework stays accurate, up to date, and aligned with evolving business and regulatory requirements. Over time, internal processes, tools, and personnel may change, making regular policy reviews essential to maintaining effective governance. By renewing policies on a consistent schedule, you can confirm that existing controls remain relevant, identify any necessary updates, and demonstrate an ongoing commitment to compliance best practices.
Policy Renewal Best Practices
Effective policy renewal keeps your organization’s documentation current, compliant, and aligned with evolving operations and regulations.
Establish a clear review cadence, typically annually and assign policy owners to ensure accountability.
Incorporate feedback from stakeholders and reflect any organizational, technical, or regulatory changes.
Maintain strong version control by tracking revisions and storing documents in a central, accessible location.
Once renewed, communicate updates broadly and provide training or acknowledgment processes to ensure understanding and adoption.
Treat renewals as part of a continuous improvement cycle, using each review to identify gaps, strengthen controls, and reinforce your commitment to compliance excellence.- Evaluate the level of changes during policy renewals to streamline the reacceptance process and minimize administrative overhead.
Maintain comprehensive records of all policy changes to facilitate audits and substantiate decisions.
Consult auditors for guidance on reacceptance requirements, especially for edge cases involving rehired employees or specific frameworks.
Establish a Renewal Cadence
Select the policy you would like to establish a renewal cadence for.
Annual will be selected by default
Select the renewal icon at the top of the page
Select the desired timeframe
Select Save changes
Please note: Editing recurrence can affect your compliance posture. Ensure that the recurrence is aligned with your company policies.
Renew a Policy
Navigate to the Policies page in the left-hand column under Compliance
Search for the policy you want to renew
Click the three-dots menu for the appropriate policy, then select View Details from the dropdown, or click directly on the policy name.
Select the renewal model and update the policy, or renew without updates.
Choose the approver.
You can assign the approval to another admin or assign it to yourself it you have admin permissions.
Click Next
In the next step, the employee groups subject to reaccepting the policy will be listed in the pop-up modal. Policies, except the onboarding SLA, do not need to be reaccepted every year.
You will need to choose from the following options
Yes, ask employees to reaccept this policy. This will prompt employees to reaccept the policy, which is helpful when you have made significant changes to it, such as introducing a new section.
Note: Employees will be notified to accept the new policy based on the Employee Reminders settings
If employee reminders are not enabled, you can send a one-time manual reminder using the Send Reminder button from the People page.- Substantive Changes: Employees must reaccept updated policies if there are material modifications, such as adding or removing sections or rewriting content. These require selecting "Yes, ask employees to reaccept this policy."
Minor Edits: Reacceptance is not needed for minor updates like grammatical corrections or logo changes. Leave the reacceptance option unchecked in such cases.
Monitor the "Policy acceptance" column on the Policies page to check compliance and confirm whether reacceptance was required.
Don't ask employees to reaccept this policy: Employees will not be asked to reaccept the policy. This is helpful when we have only made minor changes, such as fixing typos.
Select Renew
Special Cases: Rehired Employees
Treat rehired employees as new hires, requiring them to reaccept all relevant policies to align with audit requirements and update their acknowledgment records for the rehire period.
Annual Policy Renewals
During annual reviews, mandate reacceptance for substantive updates but skip it for minor administrative edits.