People Teams Distributing Policies

A New Hire's First Day

It's someone's first day. They've signed their offer letter, received their laptop, and logged into Google Workspace. Somewhere in a shared Drive folder, there should be an employee handbook, an onboarding guide, a benefits enrollment FAQ, and the remote work policy.

Half the time, those documents are out of date. The handbook still references last year's PTO policy. The benefits FAQ mentions a dental plan the company switched away from in Q2. The remote work policy was rewritten in Notion three months ago, but nobody reformatted the Google Doc version.

This isn't negligence. It's a distribution problem. The People team keeps everything current in Notion — that's their working environment, and they update policies regularly. But every update creates a formatting task: open the Google Doc, find the section that changed, manually update it to match the Notion version. Or worse, reformat the entire document from scratch.

With 5–10 policy updates per quarter and multiple documents to maintain, these formatting tasks pile up. And when they fall behind, employees end up reading outdated policies.

Why the Google Doc Version Matters

"Just share the Notion page" doesn't work for most organizations. Google Workspace is the officially supported platform. New hires don't have Notion accounts. External HR consultants reviewing your policies for compliance expect a document they can comment on and flag, not a link to an unfamiliar tool.

There's also a practical access issue. Google Docs work offline. An employee traveling or working from a location with spotty wifi can still reference the expense policy or handbook. That's not true for Notion pages.

Converting Policies with Kami

Kami converts Notion HTML exports to Google Docs. For People team documents, the relevant formatting elements are:

• Numbered sections (common in handbooks: Section 3.2 — Paid Time Off) maintain their hierarchy
• Tables (benefits comparison, PTO accrual schedules, org charts) keep column structure
• Callout blocks (used for "Important" or "Note" boxes in policies) convert as styled elements
• Nested lists (sub-policies, exception conditions) preserve their indentation

What doesn't convert: Notion database properties (like "Last updated" or "Policy owner" fields), linked databases, and toggle blocks. If your handbook uses toggles to hide detailed FAQ content, that content will appear as regular paragraphs in the Google Doc — visible, but not collapsible.

The workflow: export from Notion, upload to Kami, place the Google Doc in the appropriate shared Drive folder. For onboarding, convert the full set of new hire documents in one batch and drop them into the new hire's personal Drive folder before their start date.

Keeping Documents in Sync

The real value isn't the initial conversion — it's the ongoing updates. When the PTO policy changes in Notion, re-export that one page, re-convert, and replace the Google Doc in the shared folder. Employees accessing the folder always get the current version.

A few things to think about:

Version management: When you replace a Google Doc, the old sharing permissions transfer, but any comments or highlights on the previous version are lost. If your team uses Google Docs comments for policy review threads, save those before replacing the file.

Access control: Some policies are company-wide, others are department-specific, and some are manager-only. Mirror this access structure in Google Drive folders so the right people see the right documents.

New hire timing: Have the onboarding packet converted and placed in the new hire's folder before their start date. Don't make someone wait until noon on day one because a policy document was still being formatted.

For organizations with 30+ policy documents and frequent updates, the API can automate the conversion step. For smaller teams, manual conversion every time a policy changes works fine.

Upload a sample policy or handbook section to the demo to see how formatting comes through. Pricing has details on batch conversions. If your organization also shares procedures with external vendors, the operations use case covers that workflow.