Policies and Compliance Documents You Need
Tenders will very often ask you to submit or describe a range of company policies. This is particularly true at the Selection Stage where your key challenges to evidence that your company is managed well and is operating in line with current and relevant legislation. Assessing your company policies is an effective way for evaluators to judge this from a distance.
As well as a range of company policies, tenders often ask for other ‘compliance documentation’, including:
Business Continuity Plan
Written plans of how you would deal with external or internal threats to the continuity of your operations, for example, how you would respond if you experienced large-scale staff sickness or flooding of your premises.
Disaster Recovery Plan
This relates specifically to your IT operations and how you manage the threat of experiencing significant data loss or failure of your IT systems.
Staff Handbook
This is a comprehensive document that contains information for staff on your policies and procedures, your expectations and standards, and your overall mission statement or your company aims and objectives.
Annual Update
Once you have all of these policies and compliance documents, it’s important that you review and update them on a regular basis. Legislation changes, new legislation is introduced, and your ways of working in for overtime. What this means that the contents of your policies may need revising in order to remain up to date. Recent examples of key changes include the introduction of the Equality Act 2010, the introduction of the Bribery Act 2011, and the changes to the criminal records and vetting and barring arrangements in December 2012. All of these changes needed to be identified and reflected in company policies in order for that policy to remain valid. Submitting an out of date policy as part of a tender could result in your documentation being judged as ‘non-compliant’ and therefore not eligible for further evaluation and scoring.
As such, it’s important that all of your company policies are reviewed by a Company Director every year, that any updates and revisions are made and that they are signed and dated within the last 12 months.
Policies
The policies that frequently appear in tenders across a wide range of industry sectors are as follows:
- Health and Safety Policy
- Equality and Diversity Policy
- Anti Bribery and Anti-Corruption Policy
- Waste Management and Recycling Policy
- Risk Management Policy
- Environmental Sustainability Policy
- Energy Management Policy
- Water Management Policy
- Recruitment and Retention Policy
- Quality Assurance Policy
- Data Protection Policy
- Email Usage Policy
