Overview
Publishing a policy is the final step in making it officially available to your employees. Once your policy is drafted and approved, you can publish it directly from the platform to ensure everyone has access to the most up-to-date version. Publishing locks the content of that version, preserves a complete audit trail, and replaces any previously published version.
How to Publish a Policy
In Formalize, you can publish a policy using one of two methods:
Direct Publishing: For policies that do not require formal review.
Approval Flow: For policies that require review and sign-off by designated team members before going live.
Method 1: Direct Publishing
Open the policy draft in Formalize.
In the top-right corner, click Publish.
Confirm the action when prompted.
Note: Publishing locks the current version. To make future updates, you must create a new draft version.
Method 2: Submit a policy for approval
You can assign approval flows to your policy to ensure one or more team members review it before it is published. You can read more about how to create and assign approval flows through our Approval Flow module here.
* Tip: Approval flows support two trigger sources: manual and automatic. For policies, we recommend using manual triggering, which is the method shown in this article. You can learn more about both methods on our Approval Flows article.
How to request approval for a policy
If an approval flow is assigned to your policy:
Open the draft of the policy version you would like to publish.
Click Request policy publishing (this replaces the standard Publish button). An email notification will automatically go out to the designated reviewers.
You can track the status in the Approval process section on the right side of your policy screen.
"If you are an assigned reviewer, you can approve the policy directly from the Approval Process panel by clicking Approve and completing the approval form.
Once approved, the policy publishes automatically and its version is locked. To make further changes, create a new draft version.
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We hope this article was helpful!
If you have any additional questions, please reach out to us via chat in the bottom right corner of the page — our team is always happy to assist you further.