Policy and procedure

Policies and procedures (both written and un-written) are used in your club to guide decision making and provide transparency. Irrespective of size, all sporting clubs should adopt a series of basic policies and procedures. Most of these can be re-drafted or directly taken from your sports parent body documents at state and/or national level.

Your club should have a set of these base line documents that all participants can refer to and usually would contain policies such as:

• Member protection
• Working with children
• Codes of conduct for players, committee, officials, coaches, spectators and volunteers
• Judicial process and dispute resolution.

The combination of these policies applied to activities at your club will also assist in dealing with certain risk management issues, as many policies outline preventative measures to the issues addressed.

Once policies are in place it is important that they are regularly reviewed and updated where needed. If the policy is an adopted one from a parent body, then this review will include ensuring that the policy is the most recent one and that the parent body has undertaken the necessary steps of review.

Policies are only as good as the people who use them; the most common mistake made by organisations is not actively referring to their policy to guide decisions. The club should ensure that all committee members and club members are aware of the relevant policies that impact on their participation.

Other parent body documents at state and/or national level which may be applicable to your club include: