By Terry Baxter, Law Enforcement and Safety Specialist
When employees receive thorough policy training, they are prepared to successful complete their assigned job task. Using your adopted policies as part of your employee training will help ensure that there is consistency in your operations and reinforces expectations. Each month a critical task of your agencies operation should be addressed through training and policy review. Just think if you take one topic a month you will have covered (12 ) critical tasks by the end of the year.
Everyone knows policies and procedures are an essential component of any agency. Policies are critical for successful operations as they address foreseeability as well as provide a guideline for pertinent areas of operations and constitutes what is expected. Utilizing adopted procedures during decision making ensures that vision of the sheriff office is followed, but good decision can only be made if policy is communicated and known.
Attacking policy during litigation is easy, either you followed the established protocols, or you didn’t, so how do you ensure staff are doing what is written? Policy failure begins with administration, simply adopting and implementing procedures is only one step of the process, training and ensuring continuous education on written protocols is provided. Policy fails because it is assumed employees read the procedure and will follow the way the sequence of guidelines were established. The true fact is most read the policy or scan it once over, if no other training mechanism is put into place policy won’t be reviewed until the employee is concerned their actions on a certain job task was called into question.
Policy and procedures are rendered useless without trainings, if administration neglects continuous education policy failure will eventually happen. Risk management starts with administration and ensure that exposures are limited, policy training is critical, not only for administration, but the county and of course the employee.
In the event litigation occurs documented policy training can provide affirmative defense as long as efforts were taken to train and educate employees. Effective procedure training is largely a matter of explaining, refining and repeating.
Remember policies and procedures will fail if employees and administration don’t follow them.
