Six steps to collective internal policy making

Writing internal policies usually involves a bunch of different, interdependent steps, beyond the words in the document. If you’re wanting to establish a more collective process for your team or organisation, what are these steps and how can you practice them?

There are a set of ‘core beefs’ that RadHR has with Human Resources – treating humans as resources being the most fundamental one. But alongside this, we want to challenge the elitist and disconnected processes that, too often, form the basis of internal policymaking. It’s one thing if you’re pressed for time and you don’t get as many eyes on a draft policy as you’d like before it is signed off, but it’s another thing if you’ve assumed that only those with certain ranks, statuses or qualifications can define how your organisation should be run.

We’re not prescriptive about what an alternative approach looks like. We recognise there are a range of ways you can make policies that are more collective, democratic and participatory than those dreamt up by one person at a laptop, and that it often comes down to questions of capacity, time, and interest. But no matter your approach, we think there are a broad series of steps that can be adapted by any group looking to do policies better. We’ve broken the process down into six stages.

In reality, there may be more of these (with different rounds of research and feedback) or less (as some of the stages get squeezed together)—however you interpret this list, we hope these stages will give a sense of the points where you have a choice between more collective and more centralised ways of working. There are also ways that you might mix the stages up at times so they don’t map neatly on the spectrum. That’s okay! As long as you’re doing so with a bit of consciousness, you can mix them in whatever ways make sense for your group.

1. Who PRIORITISES the policy?

This stage is about actually deciding which policies you want to develop and in what order. If you do this stage more centrally, you may miss out on what is actually urgent or important to others in your team, which in turn will make the rest of the work more difficult. For instance, imagine trying to facilitate a collective process about an expenses policy, when everyone is struggling to address an active conflict without a policy in place to support them through it. We have tools to help you with your collective prioritisation process.

2. Who RESEARCHES the policy?

Once the policy you are working on has been decided, there is often a research phase. What are the legal red lines around a policy (our Guides section can help with this)? What are your group’s broad values that might narrow down the options? What are the specific different approaches you could take with this kind of policy, based on the answers above (e.g. Do we want our pay structure to be needs-based? Flat? Have a maximum ratio between highest and lowest paid staff?) Doing the work in advance to outline some of the options – including pros and cons – helps others to have more informed opinions when it comes to shaping the actual policy.

3. Who SHAPES the policy?

Once a direction is established (e.g. unlimited leave vs. fixed days, or paternity leave vs. gender-neutral parental leave), how do you figure out what actually goes into the policy? Are you starting from a similar policy used by another organisation, or starting from scratch? (If you’re adapting someone else’s policies, we have an adapting policies workshop template you can run in a team to do that.)

4. Who WRITES the policy?

If the direction is clear and the details have been outlined, drafting the policy doesn’t need to be as massive a job as it is without the steps above. There will always be some finer details that those doing the drafting will have to make some calls on, which didn’t get discussed in the research or shaping stages, but hopefully, these will be relatively few and easy to point out in the drafts (e.g. using yellow highlighting for paragraphs or sections of text that haven’t been previously discussed with others).

5. Who REVIEWS the policy?

However you’ve done the steps leading up to this point, creating good space for feedback is critical. Even if your team is small and very busy, this is one of the key moments to make sure that whatever policy has emerged is not wildly off the mark for those who will use it. We are currently developing a workshop tool for getting effective policy feedback from a team, but in the meantime, it’s worth thinking about:

• Ensuring people get the policy to read in advance;
• Highlighting key or potentially contentious parts of the policy; 
• Asking questions about how the policy relates to your shared values;
• Asking questions about how the policy relates to practicalities/costs/implementation;
• Surfacing how the policy might fit (or not) with other policies you have or need;
• Ensuring there is still a genuine opportunity for feedback to be taken on board and changes to be made.

6. Who APPROVES the policy?

Depending on the structure of your organisation, you may or may not have as much control over the actual sign-off process for a policy. If you do, this is a significant way to build a sense of shared ownership over whatever policies you end up having. In smaller organisations, who is making the call may not be as significant if there has been an ongoing process of involvement of more of the team. Obviously, if a team puts in a ton of collective work on a policy and it is then overturned by a board, that won’t go down well. At the same time, if people are only involved at the sign-off stage, they are unlikely to feel that invested in whatever has been produced anyway, which is just to say that the final decision is not always make-or-break for a meaningful collective process, as long as it’s not actively undermining the work that has come before it.