These 3 tips for maintaining healthy policies and procedures will simplify your efforts to keep the documents governing your program’s operation healthy. Fit policies and procedures ensure program consistency, continuity, and compliance with outside regulations. In addition, they help keep everyone safe and healthy and offer some legal protection to the program and staff.

Sufficient Scope

Make sure your policies and procedures cover everything that needs covering. Creating and maintaining healthy policies and procedures can seem like time-consuming busywork. This often leads many programs to do the bare minimum when developing policies and procedures. Topics that should be addressed are not. This can leave people confounded and unsure about how to proceed in certain situations. For example, many programs that purport to be play-based and child-led in their promotional materials lack policies and procedures that clearly explain what those terms mean or how they are implemented.

Active Adherence

Healthy policies and procedures must be unfailingly followed. For example, a classroom management policy that explicitly bans the use of Time Out is worthless if the practice is regularly used by 2/3 of the staff. For this to happen, the people required to follow the policies and procedures need to see them. This may sound obvious, but as I’ve investigated the topic, I have heard from many caregivers who have worked in programs where they never laid eyes on the organization’s policies and procedures. Not only do the staff need copies of these documents, they also need to understand them.

This process can’t be overlooked or rushed. Adherence requires staff training. It should be integral to the program’s onboarding process and ongoing staff development. But training is not enough. Performing compliance audits from time to time reveals which policies are being adhered to and which are not

Regular Review

Policies and procedures must be reviewed regularly to keep them healthy and ensure they are doing their job. They need to be updated or replaced if they’re not working as they should. Review policies and procedures when changes are made to the program and when regulations or technologies change. For example, incidents—a head injury or broken bone should also trigger a review. Finally, the passage of time should prompt reviews. Review new policies and procedures six months after implementation to ensure they are working as expected. From there, all policies should be reviewed at least every 2 years.

Healthy Policies And Procedures Wrap Up

The purpose of policies and procedures is to let people know “what we do here and how we do it.” The goal is to have everyone on the same page. The quality of care and continuity of service provided by early learning settings lacking healthy policies and procedures could be improved. Policies and procedures that fail to cover essential topics, are not adhered to, or are outdated leave staff hanging, unsure of how to proceed, and second-guessing themselves and each other. Any steps toward improvement in the areas outlined above will be beneficial and get you closer to genuinely healthy policies and procedures.

You’ll find a free handout covering this topic here.

Related Policy And Procedure Forms And Handouts

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