How Often Should You Review Your Policies?
Policy review is not usually the type of agenda item that makes board members want to attend the meeting.

I recommend that policy review be on the agenda every meeting. This helps to keep the policies that everyone is supposed to be following top of mind. Also if you review every meeting then you don’t ever have to call a meeting that is only about reviewing policies. Good luck getting a quorum with an agenda like that.

Most groups have policies. In general a policy should be reviewed whenever it needs to be changed (no kidding) or at least every three years. If you take the policy manual and divide it up into thirds, then you have the amount of policy manual that you need to review this year, divide that up by the number of meetings that you will have during the year, and you have a plan.

If you are very organized, you can even draw up a table of which policies are being reviewed when so that conscientious board members can actually prepare for that conversation.

There is likely a committee that is in charge of policy review. Maybe the governance committee. This committee’s terms of reference would include the policy review as well as being on the lookout for policies that need to be developed and the training of the board members on these policies.

I attend an annual governance conference and usually come away with a list of policies that are either new to me or there is a change that I should be recommending to these policies. Policies have to change as situations change. The type of anti-harassment policies we need now are much more extensive than the ones we had even ten years ago.

Here is an example. Some groups now have a “Rob Ford” policy adjustment. As follows, many groups have a rule that if a board member is charged with a criminal offence they are suspended from membership on the board until the matter is resolved. If convicted, they cannot continue to serve, if the charges are dropped the board member can be reinstated. So far so good. But what if a board member admits to criminal activity, on the record, but is never charged or convicted? Until this actually happened on TV most boards would not have had a policy that allowed them to remove a board member. The rule was that the board member had to be charged or convicted. You see that a change to policy had to be made, if you wanted to be able to remove board members who are telling people that they are criminals, but are not charged with any offences.

Policies are not items that should be written down and then forgotten. Policies are a part of how your group demonstrates their good governance and need to be updated regularly. When a policy is created, pick a time for it to be reviewed and document that decision. Having a plan for how often policies are going to be reviewed should lead to an organization having a set of policies that are up to date and effective in providing the governance that is needed to help the organization achieve their goals.
['Debi Peverill']
['Governance', 'Board', 'Productivity', 'Meetings', 'Committee']