Working with Policies and Procedures

The majority of organisations have policies and procedures and, in sectors like community services, which are highly legislated and responsible for the care and wellbeing of vulnerable people, effective policies and procedures are particularly important.

Understanding Policies and Procedures

Communicating about policies and procedures is an important part of your work, and to do so you need to have a good understanding of the role both play in community services.

Purposes of Policies and Procedures

It is usual for organisations to have a policy and associated procedures for the majority of the organisation’s activities. The purpose of these documents is to:

• Help achieve legislative compliance
• Help achieve the organisation’s objectives
• Ensure consistency across the organisation
• Ensure quality
• Assist in continuous improvement
• Ensure safety
• Ensure privacy for clients, staff, contractors and other people interacting with the organisation
• Ensure that the financial operations of the organisation are in order
• Ensure that there are anti-discrimination processes in place
• Ensure that there is equity and fairness in employment

Policies

A policy is a statement of a guiding principle for all members of the organisation. The role of a policy is to ensure consistency across the organisation, assist with legislative compliance, provide clarity for employees, service providers, suppliers, customers and clients and to maintain quality and safety.

As a minimum, most organisations will have policies regarding:

• Safety
• Resourcing
• Financial controls
• Quality and service standards
• Employee standards
• Privacy and confidentiality
• IT use
• Compliance

Resource
The University of Sydney allows public access to its policy library. Take a few moments now to explore the range of policies that the University has: https://www.sydney.edu.au/policies/

Procedures

A procedure describes the details, processes or steps for implementing a policy and includes the who, what, where and how. Procedures are the ‘recipe’ for implementing a policy.

Activity 3A
Relating Policies to Procedures  Locate the injury management policy on the University of Sydney website,(https://www.sydney.edu.au/policies/) given above (or refer to your own organisation’s injury management policy). Now look at the relevant procedure (tip: you will find it via the ‘Related Documents’ link) and answer the following questions:
How does the procedure relate to the policy
What is the difference between the policy and the procedure
Make a summary of policy and its related procedure using dot points

Policies and Procedures in Community Services

The policies and procedures that will impact your role will always depend on the sector of community services that you work in, the state or territory in which you work and the organisation. There are, however, some that will be common across most of your career and may include:

Your organisation will also have requirements that it will expect you to adhere to which might include:

• Access and equity principles and practice
• Business and performance plans
• Defined resource parameters
• Ethical standards
• Goals, objectives, plans, systems and processes
• Legal and organisational policies, guidelines and requirements
• OHS policies, procedures and programs
• Quality and continuous improvement processes and standards
• Quality assurance and procedures manual

Getting Help with Policies and Procedures

Understanding and applying an organisation’s policies and procedures can sometimes be difficult. When you are new to an organisation, you may not understand some of the terminology, systems or context so it is important to ask for assistance. Sources of assistance may include:

• Related policies or procedures as sometimes looking at related information will provide the context that you need or will give you a better picture of how things fit together
• Ask your manager, supervisor or colleagues
• Refer to the person named in the documents
• Refer to the relevant legislation
• Refer to codes of conduct or practice guidelines related to the sector that you are working in

Updating Policies and Procedures to Reflect Legislative Changes

From time to time, legislation related to community services will change. If this occurs, you may need to update policies and procedures to reflect the change. This will ensure that there is consistency in the way that the legislation is applied and to assist the organisation and its people to comply with the changes.

The following is one step-by-step process for making these changes but you should always begin by looking at your organisation’s policy review processes.

Sharing Information with Others

There are a number of steps you can work through when communicating with others in your workplace about policies and procedures. The steps are:

• Plan for communication wherever possible
• Understand your target audience
• Stick to your plan as much as possible
• Avoid getting caught in the ‘emotion’ trap and stay on point
• Adjust your techniques to your target audience
• Use appropriate supporting resources
• Reflect and review whenever possible
• Match your non-verbal cues with your verbal communication
• Communicate assertively, not aggressively
• Keep your objectives in mind
• Close the feedback loop and ask yourself if your communication strategy is working

Communicating with Diverse Groups

Think about the communication needs of the people in your workplace. Consider how you might need to modify your communication to suit their specific needs. You may need to adjust your approach in some situations, such as by providing a document which has been translated into another language or meeting with staff members in small groups or individually rather than in a whole team meeting.

Record keeping and documentation must be kept whenever you are communicating or making changes to policies and procedures.

Your organisation will probably have strategies in place for consulting, drafting and distributing new, drafted or revised policies and procedures to stakeholders and for gathering their feedback. Regardless of the strategy used, it is important that all stakeholders see and understand the changes and the strategy should include a way of ensuring this. This might include:

• Facilitating support for consultation and feedback
• A read response on emails
• A confirmation slip that is distributed with hard copies
• Incorporating policies and procedural awareness in performance management systems
• Keeping records of each copy distributed
• Asking for written confirmation that a document has been read
• Asking for the document to be returned and signed once it has been read

Secure Storage of Records

Most organisations will include a system for maintaining document security in the workplace and for situations where workers are off-site, such as during a home or community visit. Documents should be kept according to the requirements of your workplace, which may include placing them in a filing cabinet, using an agreed naming system for files or adding passwords to digital documents.

Activity 2B
Record Storage Research a community services organisation. Find out how they store and maintain digital and print records. What do they do to make sure people have access to the most up-to-date records? How do they store confidential documents?

 

In community services work, clients, their families and the broader community have expectations about how you protect the right to confidentiality of clients. You will often become aware of sensitive information in relation to clients, and you have a legal and moral duty to respect the right of your client to not have this information shared with others. This is called respecting confidentiality.

Confidentiality is about protecting more than just the person’s information. It is about protecting their stories, their sense of self, sometimes their safety and their right to decide for themselves what is shared and with who.

All of the information that you and your team have about a child or young person and their family in your care is highly confidential and cannot be shared except in specific circumstances which are defined by your organisation and the legislation. General advice for protecting those in care includes:

• Never share information of any kind with your friends or family. You will, of course, need to debrief and make the most of the support offered by these people but if you need to discuss specifics, work with your supervisor, appropriate colleague or a member of the care team
• Never post information to social media
• Never share information which could identify a young person, their situation, location or their family
• Remember that, unless it is in the child or young person’s best interests to share information, they have a right to trust that their information will be kept confidential
• A child or young person’s rights in this area extend beyond when they have left the unit and even beyond when they have left care

Case Study

Gemima works with a young person who has shared information with her about another client who is known to Gemima through family networks. Gemima is given some photos of the young person and decides to share them on social media with others in her family. She sees no harm in this, after all, she already knows the young person and she believes she is simply passing on family photos. Gemima’s supervisor, however, receives a phone call from Gemima’s aunty who has been distressed to see herself in the background of some of the photos. The aunty is a very private person who never puts images of herself online. She is angry that her own image has been shared without her permission in this way.

Nominating Roles and Responsibilities

Roles and responsibilities are covered within the context of organisational policies and procedures as well as through job or position statements.

Policies and Procedures

Policies and procedures are one tool which you can utilise to provide information to others in your workplace. If you are in a leadership position, you can work within the policies and procedures of your organisation to inform others and provide a clear outline of how they should respond in particular situations. Policies provide the statement about what your organisation values, thinks and believes while the procedures provide a ‘how to’ of step-by-step information. You should ensure that your work team:

• Knows where and how to access policies and procedures
• Are accessing the latest, most up-to-date version
• Is able to read, comprehend and apply the policies and procedures
• Regularly discusses and makes suggestions about the policies and procedures, including any changes
• Are active participants in continuous improvement of the documents
• See policies and procedures as working documents which should be used and applied in daily work tasks

Activity 3C
Job Statements Go online or access resources in a community services workplace. Locate copies of at least three different job descriptions in community services at different levels of responsibility (such as a senior manager, case manager and outreach worker). Read each statement and highlight the key words or phrases which refer to levels of responsibility and accountability.

Job Statements

When a worker commences in a new role, they should be given a clear and detailed position or job statement. This is a written document which describes the various aspects of their role. It could include:

Job statements are useful in helping others in the workplace fully understand their role and responsibilities.

This is particularly important when it comes to areas of practice such as understanding and managing professional boundaries, informed consent and discrimination.

Boundaries

A respectful, trusting and supportive relationship between direct-carers and the children and young people in care is a crucial element in the success of an out-of-home care placement. Growing and facilitating those relationships while maintaining a professional and ethical relationship can be a tricky but necessary balancing act. This can be equally so for a supervisor and the relationship with their team.

If the professional relationship is lost, there is the potential for the child or young person’s rights to be inadvertently violated. It is potentially more difficult to maintain your professional standards and your judgment may be clouded by your emotions. A relationship which has moved beyond professional boundaries can create a sense of dependence in the child or young person. When it becomes time for the child or young person to move on, or for you to change jobs, this can add to the young person’s sense of loss and dislocation.

Informed Consent

In the context of community services and OOHC, the term informed consent is usually relevant to medical and dental treatment and refers to a clear and thorough understanding of the risks, benefits and process of the treatment being proposed.

Before anyone can consent to treatment, a medical practitioner or dentist must be satisfied that the person being treated or the person who is acting on their behalf has the capacity to fully understand what is being proposed.

In the case of a young person, a child 14 years or older can give informed consent as long as they have the maturity and capacity to understand what is being proposed. If the child is under 14, or the person does not have the capacity to understand what is being proposed, they will need someone else to provide that consent.

The type of order that the person is on, the organisation’s policies and procedures, the carer’s scope of practice, the care arrangements in place and the medical care required will all determine who can provide informed consent.

Importantly, consent is not required where there is a life-threatening emergency (as determined by a medical practitioner) or where there is a likelihood of permanent or serious damage.

Consent should always be properly documented according to the organisation’s policies and procedures and the relevant legislative requirements and appropriate record keeping procedures should be followed.

Dignity of Risk

Where duty of care is about the legal responsibility of the organisation to do no harm to the people who they support and care for, dignity of risk is about their right to be able to take risks, make mistakes and to learn from them.

Dignity of risk comes from the premise that every person has the right to decide how they want to live their life. It is about respecting each person’s right to:

Ultimately, dignity of risk is about freedom.

Dignity of risk is not about:

• Protecting the people in your care from themselves
• Only allowing the people in your care to make decisions in areas that you feel comfortable or where there is no risk

Resource
There are some excellent videos and articles about dignity of risk and duty of care. Try the following links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf4Y7v-SLtc https://www.interchangewa.org.au/interchange-news/duty-care-dignity-risk/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqA6sZk3xus

It may seem as though dignity of risk and duty of care will often overlap, especially when caring for children and young people. Your role as a supervisor and carer is to ensure that you find the balance between the two. Asking yourself the following questions may assist in finding that balance:

• What is the foreseeable risk in allowing/facilitating an activity? How likely is it that the risk might occur? If the risk does occur, what is the likely harm and how significant is the harm?
• What benefit might the child or young person gain from the activity?
• Can I reduce the risk while still achieving the benefits?
• Do the benefits outweigh the risks?
• Given that respecting the dignity of children and young people in my care is a key element of establishing a relationship and promoting resilience through empowerment, am I respecting the right of the person to a dignity of risk in this instance?
• Am I role-modelling effective decision-making in this instance or am I saying no because I feel uncomfortable?
• What do my organisation’s policies and procedures say?
• What are my legislative requirements?

Keep in mind that duty of care and dignity of risk are not two competing philosophies. Rather, that offering a dignity of risk falls under your duty of care. It is part of your responsibility to the children and young people in your care to assist them to develop independence and resilience, and to foster a sense of personal worth and empowerment. Supporting them to make decisions for themselves is critical to achieving this.

Discrimination

All people in Australia are protected from discrimination and are given equal employment opportunities (EEO) by legislation. This legislation protects against discrimination on the basis of:

• Race
• Colour
• Sex
• Religion
• Political opinion
• National extraction
• Social origin
• Age
• Medical record
• Criminal record
• Marital status
• Impairment
• Disability
• Nationality
• Sexual preference
• Trade union activity

Over the past 30 years the Commonwealth government and the state and territory governments have introduced anti-discrimination laws to help protect people from discrimination and harassment.

The following laws operate at a federal level and the Australian Human Rights Commission has statutory responsibilities under them including:

• Age Discrimination Act 2004
• Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986
• Disability Discrimination Act 1992
• Racial Discrimination Act 1975
• Sex Discrimination Act 1984

Commonwealth laws and the state and territory laws generally cover the same grounds and areas of discrimination. There are some ‘gaps,’ however, in the protection that is offered between different states and territories and at a Commonwealth level.

In addition, there are circumstances where only the Commonwealth law would apply or where only the state law would apply.

The federal laws relating to anti-discrimination and EEO include:

• Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986
• Age Discrimination Act 2004 (Cth)
• Disability Discrimination Act 1992
• Racial Discrimination Act 1975
• Sex Discrimination Act 1984

Activity 3D

Discrimination Resources Tracker  Throughout your studies, you will come across information and resources that will be useful throughout your career. Use the technology of your choice to develop a strategy for keeping track of this information. Think about how you might like to access this information in the future. The Australian Human Rights Commission website contains a wealth of information relating to anti-discrimination and EEO. Explore the website and make an entry in your information tracker tool or in a resources folder.

 

From time to time, legislation or other changes may occur in the community services sector. For example, an aspect of a significant law may change which requires a response from your organisation. Once a legislative change has been identified which impacts your organisation, it is important that all related policy, procedures and processes are updated to ensure that there is consistency in the way that the legislation is applied and to assist the organisation and its people to comply with the changes. You will need to share, amend and communicate information effectively to and within your work team. You will also need to seek out information about how the change or amendment might affect specific work roles and duties within the team and the clients with whom you work. This will require you to collect information and feedback as well as to share and provide it appropriately.

Your Role as an Advocate

In a community services environment, it is critical that the voices of the clients are not lost when considering change. Your clients are your most important stakeholder and your role as their advocate extends beyond meeting their day-to-day needs to ensuring that your organisation hears their voices at consults in a real way regarding changes that impact them. This is equally true regardless of whether you are working with children and young people or adults.

Website
The Human Rights Commission explains the right of every child to be involved in decisions affecting their life at the following link: https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/childrens-rights/about-childrens-rights

Requesting Feedback

There are a number of strategies for requesting feedback and these can include:

Questionnaires

A questionnaire/survey is useful for gathering a range of input while minimising disruption to the workplace. It is also useful for conducting qualitative and quantitative analysis. Questions should be clear and carefully constructed.

Surveys

A survey is similar to a questionnaire but is generally narrower in its focus.

Suggestion Boxes

Suggestion boxes are useful where you want honest feedback or where you suspect that people might be reluctant to provide feedback for fear of causing offence/getting into trouble.

Interviews

An interview is useful for gathering answers to specific questions. They can, however, restrict the depth of the information that you collect. Questions should be carefully designed and reviewed to ensure that the objective is clear.

Focus Groups

Focus group are a group of people brought together with a facilitator to discuss a specific issue in a group forum. They are useful for gathering a range of opinions and perspectives. The main risk in using focus groups is that the range of information that you gather is too broad. They can also be difficult to keep on track and you may find that the group gets bogged down. Key principles for the effective use of focus groups include being clear about what it is that you hope to know at the end of the session, engaging an experienced facilitator to keep the discussion on track, writing clear questions and accurately recording the outcomes.

Group Meetings

This can include on-site or in-home visits/observations. On-site visits are particularly useful for observing processes/issues in a real-world situation. They are also useful for identifying problems and training requirements. OHS issues should always be considered.

Research

Research is particularly useful in gathering information external to the organisation. Sources should be reliable and current.

Activity 3E
Strategies Think about each of the information gathering strategies listed above. What types of policy and procedure related information would be most appropriate for each strategy? List at least three for each of the following:
Focus groups
Interviews
On-site visits/observations
Questionnaires/surveys
Research

Meeting the Interests of Stakeholders

One of the key considerations when implementing any workplace change is that the process or policy continues to meet the needs and interests of all of the stakeholders. Let us think about how you would ensure that the stakeholder interests are met by new work procedures related to privacy and ethics. What process would you use to implement new policies and procedures in these areas?

Most importantly, develop a thorough understanding of the stakeholder needs. Without this, it is easy to head off in the wrong direction or misinterpret the direction that the policy or procedure should take.

• Ensure that the voices of the client are heard and that all stakeholder groups are considered
• Use effective questioning techniques
• Use effective information gathering methods
• Use effective listening techniques
• Include current legislative requirements, legislative review and development of policy and procedures in all project planning and implementation stages
• Develop checklists around legislative requirements
• Incorporate legislative requirements and stakeholder requirements in all implementation plans
• Seek expert review and advice
• Include satisfaction of legislative requirements and stakeholder requirements in feedback mechanisms
• Include legislative requirements in sign-off processes

Measuring Success

Because so much work goes into the consultation, feedback and implementation phase of new policies and procedures, it is often tempting to sign-off and move on to the next task on your list. It is important, however, to measure the success (or otherwise) of the processes. Some organisations have formal processes for this and others do not but there are still ways that you can keep your eye on progress. For example:

• Check in with your team: are there any glitches in implementation? Have any issues arisen over time? Are the results of the change as expected?
• Check in with stakeholders (especially clients): how has the change impacted them? Do they need additional information/support? Do they need help with feedback mechanisms?
• Provide feedback to your team and stakeholders: celebrate successes, keep them up-to-date with any changes or fixes that will be made as a result of their feedback
• Provide feedback to the organisation

Activity 3F
Feedback in a WorkplaceCheck your organisation’s policies and procedures system. Is there a feedback mechanism? What is the process for providing feedback?

Review Questions
Use the following questions check your knowledge
1.	Identify three examples of a policy in a community services workplace.
2.	Explain one similarity and one difference between a policy and a procedure.
3.	How would you respond in a situation where you did not fully understand a procedure in your workplace?
4.	A worker in your team has told you that another worker has shared photos from a recent client outreach program on social media without permission from the clients or the organisation. As the team leader, what would you do?