Where Should Our Policies and Procedures Go Part 2 (Episode 63 Transcript)

Hello loyal listeners, and welcome back to another 6-minute solution on the 1,001 Business Problems Solved with Microsoft Teams podcast.
I’m Annie Rynd and I’m your faithful hostess with the mostest every Monday.
Today, we’re going to do Part 2 of our Policies and Procedures series.
Last week, I told you how to protect your policies and procedures from employees who might accidentally edit or delete them if you stored them in a Teams site. As you know, all members of a Team have edit permissions in a Team and that just doesn’t work for important documents you only want employees to view but not edit.
Of course, for that solution, go back and listen to Part 1 from last week.
Today, I’m going to tip you off to a nifty solution that will save your staff a lot of time and effort. As a boss type person, that’s always a good thing!
So, here’s how most HR departments and business owners handle policies and procedures.
They work on the draft document on either their hard drive or within a protected shared drive or document library somewhere. Perhaps multiple people work on it, and more than likely, a second or third person provides feedback until the point where everyone agrees the document is ready for prime time.
Often, there are 10 or 20 versions of the file as well. We all know those other 19 versions will stay there indefinitely, even though they’re not needed…but that’s a solution for another day!
Anyway, at that point, they copy the finished document over into the place it is accessed by employees. Now, that final location may be somewhere employees have edit rights, such as a Teams site, so of course the document must be turned into a PDF first.
That’s a lot of steps and a lot of work!
And then, if someone notices an error or there needs to be a revision, the whole process has to start over again. Draft it in one place, change it to PDF, then copy it over to the final location.
Well, let me tell you how you can eliminate about 80% of that work for your staff.
First, create your final storage document library as I described last week. That’s probably in your SharePoint Intranet site, or perhaps you decided to create a second library in your Teams site.
Regardless, go into the Library settings for that library. I told how to do that last week, but remember, you can always ask Copilot, “Copilot, how do I access my document library settings in Teams? ” Copilot will walk you right through it.
When you get to the library settings page, click the link to go to Versioning Settings. Then, simply toggle the choice that says, “Create major and minor draft versions.
You can optionally tell it how many draft versions to retain, but I usually don’t mess with that.
Here’s what that does for you and how it works.
First, you’ll only have one source of the truth. No more saving, then saving as the final draft, then turning it into a PDF, and moving it to the final location.
You’ll just edit the document in its final location to start with!
SharePoint – the beast behind the scenes in Teams – will save a new draft version every time you edit the document…but employees will not see the changes until you choose to publish it.
So, here’s your new process.
Let’s say you have a policy in the library already. That’s version 1.0. Your staff person who has edit rights in the library, then starts editing the document. The first edited version is automatically saved as version 1.1. The next time it’s edited, it’s automatically saved as version 1.2. That keeps going and going until someone with edit rights chooses to publish it. That’s the new approved version and it becomes version 2.0.
Versions 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and so on are invisible to anyone with read only rights. It’s only when the editing employee chooses to publish as a major version that it becomes visible to everyone.
Versioning is awesome because employees no longer have to tag on those confusing rev numbers and dates at the end of file names and then try to keep them all straight. That’s terrible clutter at best and an embarrassing goof up at worst when someone publishes the wrong version.
Again, that little trick is called major and minor versioning. It’s been around for more than twenty years and most HR departments around the world are still not aware of it.
But, that’s what we do around here. Give you tips and tricks and business solutions that catapult you well past your competitors. I just love doing that for our listeners!
Before we wrap things up today, I want to mention a couple things.
We’re at episode 63 – can you believe it – and I don’t think I’ve ever plugged our consulting services on this podcast. I really need to start doing that more often because it can be a game changer for some of you.
If you find these solutions helpful, imagine how much quicker your business could improve with experienced Teams deployment assistance. You’re obviously a do-it-yourselfer or you wouldn’t be listening but even do-it-yourselfers can get impatient at times. Arnie can get you there so fast that it may be worth considering. After all, he has helped hundreds of organizations strategically deploy Teams and Microsoft 365.
If you don’t believe your staff is 30% more efficient within 30 days, you can have every bit of your money back. That’s how confident we are in our OMG System.
Teams trainers are a dime a dozen and Copilot is free, but what those things don’t give you is a Teams environment specifically tailored to your unique business processes. If that sounds tempting, just go to countyquest.com and set up a free initial consultation.
And last but not least, today is Memorial Day. Don’t forget to stop for a few minutes as you’re grilling out and give thanks for the many men and women in our military who didn’t come home. This day is for them. Let’s all be thankful for what they gave us.
And with that, thanks for listening and I’ll see you next week. This is Annie, signing off!