Your pocket guide for approaching regulatory changes with a modern lens

As we emerge from COVID-19 and legislative sessions wind down, regulatory agencies are gearing up to start working on rulemakings and policy to reflect all of the changes afoot.

Nearly every industry of our economy was disrupted by the pandemic in some way. Government is no exception. In fact, more policy was produced in the last year than ever before–many of it done through emergency rulemakings.

At Esper, our mission is to help policymakers focus on policy, not paperwork. We believe your time is best spent focusing on substantive regulatory issues, not on the minutiae of regulatory management. As you settle into your post-session routine, we wrote a helpful pocket guide for how to approach upcoming regulatory changes.

1 – Take stock

COVID-19 ushered in countless policy changes, and the legislative session introduced new regulatory work. You need an easy way to know what needs immediate attention and what can wait for now.

• Are you going to keep the policy changes you made during COVID-19 or revise or repeal them?
• What new regulatory work needs to occur due to the legislative session? When do these rulemakings need to be statutorily effective?

2 – Establish common ground internally

With more agencies going remote or remote-flexible, it’s harder to keep track of who’s working on what. Use project management technology to assign regulatory projects and set milestones for completion.

• Fun fact: Esper’s work-backward plan helps you build a project milestone calendar based on your due date!

3 – Eliminate messy email chains

When you’re working on a regulatory package, A LOT of documents are passed back and forth for review. You’ve got to make sure the text of the regulation and all of the associated cost-benefit analyses go through rounds of feedback from different stakeholders, and email is not the most efficient way to do it.

• Seamless regulatory document collaboration does exist, and Esper makes it easy for different stakeholders to concurrently read, edit, and comment on documents in a single place. You might be wondering: “but what if I only want to grant someone comment-only privileges?” You can do that, too!

4 – Simplify approvals

All regulations have to go through an internal approval process. You typically need sign-off from subject matter experts, general counsel, the agency leadership, and sometimes the governor’s office. Making sure everyone signs off in a time-sensitive way is important when you have statutory mandated deadlines.

• Esper helps you quickly route smart rulemaking packages to the correct person for approval, and nudge them when they need to sign-off.
• You can have a clearly documented approval process that takes into account the milestones for your rulemakings.

5 – Establish a single source of truth

It’s happened to everyone: someone in one part of the organization is working on the same thing you’re working on. These communication mishaps are much easily avoided when your entire team has visibility into different projects across the organization.

• Better yet, by introducing more transparency in your agency’s regulatory process, you can reward the wins and share progress!