Where Should Our Policies and Procedures Go? – Part 1 (Episode 62 Transcript)

Hello! You’ve found the 1,001 Business Problems Solved with Microsoft Teams podcast, and I’m Annie Rynd, your faithful hostess. I bring you bite-sized episodes every Monday that tell you how you can solve many of your most common and frustrating business problems using Microsoft Teams.

This is great because I bet you’re already paying for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 and the more you can do with it, the better your return on your technology budget.

Our episodes are almost always 6 minutes or less, so I give you the juicy solutions and then send you on your way.

Today, I’m going to give you a solution to a need that all organizations have, unless they are businesses with no employees besides the business owner. If you have two levels or more in your org chart, this episode is for you.

All organizations with employees have a need to house, protect, and publicize their policies and procedures. All employees need to have quick access to those important documents, but you don’t need employees intentionally or accidentally changing or deleting those documents.

As you likely know already, documents stored in Teams can be edited by all team members by default. That’s a good thing, because you can manage all permissions in the teams site by simply adding or removing team members.

While that’s good for most workgroup documents, it isn’t good for policies and procedures for the reason I stated earlier. Policies and procedures are generally intended to be one-way. It’s management’s way to state clearly how things are going to be and how business processes are going to work. You don’t need everybody in the company editing those documents!

Many organizations turn the Word documents into PDFs, but that’s laborious and still doesn’t address the potential problem of employees accidentally deleting the PDFs since they have full control of documents in their Teams sites.

Next week in Part 2, I’ll cover a really slick way to manage your policies and procedures and save a ton of work. That one is always a home run with our clients!

Well, you could certainly go into the SharePoint document library behind the scenes in Teams and customize permissions at the granular level…but I don’t personally like that. It’s messy and I think it invites confusion with the files tab because it’s just simpler to keep the permissions in a Teams site – more specifically the files in the files tabs – as simple and uniform as possible.
Here's how we do it for clients.

As you likely also know, SharePoint is the beast powering Teams behind the scenes. Files stored in Teams are actually stored in a SharePoint document library even though it is nicely window dressed in the Teams channel.

You want to go into SharePoint – whether in the SharePoint that accompanies your All Employees Teams site, or another one that perhaps serves as your company intranet website and build a brand new document library. I could tell you how to do that, but then we’d go over six minutes and besides, you can always ask copilot how to create a new document library in SharePoint.

The part I need to help you with is how to set the permissions in that document library so that, while all employees can read the policy and procedure documents, only designated people can edit them.

Once you have your new document library, you need to do the following. Please be aware that the next minute or so will be a little techie, so bring in your IT guru if you must. Anyway, here’s how.
Open the document library in your browser and click the little cog icon at the upper right corner of the page. Of course, you can only do that if you have adequate permissions for the document library to start with.

Then, select library settings. Now, clicking that used to take you right to the awesome settings page, but Microsoft decided you need to click yet one more time, so on the abbreviated window that pops up, click the “ more library settings ” link.

That will bring up the big beautiful library settings page.
There, you need to click on the Permissions for this document library link.

When that page pops up, you’ll need to stop inheriting permissions from the site itself. There will be a button on the left side of the ribbon for that. It’ll ask you if you really really want to do that, and you should click the “ heck yes ” button.

Now, you can demote or remove individuals or groups who may already have access and who should not have. You will want to make most everyone View or Read Only.

It is always best practice to use groups rather than individuals, so when you grant access, start typing the name of a Team’s name and if you have already created that workgroup’s teams site, the name should auto-populate quickly.

Then, add or promote the people or groups you want to be able to edit. Now, it’s important to note that you want to give these people contribute permissions and not edit permissions. I know that seems like six of one and a half dozen of the other, but there’s a big difference.

Edit allows people to change the guts of the document library. You don’t want that! Unless they’re schooled in SharePoint administration, that’s way more power than you want them to have.

You want to grant contribute permissions. That allows them to edit documents without accidentally screwing up the mechanics of your library.

Once you do that, save your changes, but don’t leave that page yet!

You need to double check your work because those are important documents.

To do that, click the check permissions button in the ribbon. When that pops up, test your permissions settings against different employees. You want to make sure the right people are restricted and the right people are enabled.

Type a lower-level employee’s name into that box and see what permissions he or she has. In most cases, that employee should only have view privileges.

Now conversely, type an employee’s name into the box who should be able to edit documents. That should return contribute permissions.

If everything looks good, you can exit out of everything.

There’s one more step to this process that you won’t want to skip.

What good are policies and procedures if employees can’t get to them easily? If you simply create the library and put all the documents into it, employees probably won’t know how to access them.

That’s the beauty of Teams. Just go to the Teams sites where employees work every day and create a tab somewhere in a pertinent channel. That channel is often the General channel, or at least the channel that is used for management communications to employees.

You’ll click the little plus in the tabs row and choose a SharePoint tab. In that dialog box that pops up, choose document library and either pick your new library from the suggested choices, or paste the library’s url into the box.

So, that’s how you can store and present your policies and procedures while also protecting them from undesired editing.
Yes I know. I took seven minutes today, but this was an important topic! Well worth the extra minute!

Did you like that solution? If so, be sure to tune in to part two next Monday, and please hit that subscribe button and click some stars for us. We’d really appreciate it if you also shared our podcast with your business besties.

And with that, I’m going to send you on your way. I’ll see you next week for part two. This is Annie, signing off!