FAQs

If you’d like to suggest an FAQ just contact us.

What do you mean by radical? 

In short, we mean practices which centre care and collectivity, challenge unaccountable authority and aim to shift power and resources away from those who usually have more of them, towards those who often have less of them. If we believe in these things in the wider world, we should be working to find ways of practicing them in the groups we form together. Maybe that’s a low bar, but it’s a long way from how most organisations operate and feels like a strong baseline for us to be working towards, together!

What do you mean by HR?

None of the RadHR Core Team are, or ever have been, HR professionals. We use the name as a bit of a joke, because HR is generally anything but radical. What we hope will be understood by it, is that this site is about figuring out ways of working together that align with more progressive and liberatory values.

How do you decide what goes in the RadHR Library?

Currently, the decisions about which policies, processes and ways of working end up in the RadHR Library lands with the RadHR Core Team. For clarity, we’ve only turned down a couple of policies in the four years since RadHR got started. These are the questions we ask of each policy or process that is uploaded by members of the RadHR Community:

• Does any part of the policy align with the kinds of ‘radical’ ideas we outline in the FAQ above?
• Does it feel broadly aligned with the RadHR Values?

That’s it!

We don’t expect every policy or process to have answers to every way that elitist, oppressive, uncaring policies can play out, but if we think conscious effort has been made to ensure that some aspects of those standard practices are being subverted in some way, we want to have them in the library.

There are examples in the Library that are great on gender equity, or democratic participation, or holistic understandings of care, but haven’t thought as much about other areas where we can be shifting how we work—and that’s ok! We hope that by making a range of policies and processes from across the community available, that we can continue to build on each other’s strengths and areas of particular knowledge and wisdom, and gradually fill in the gaps in our collective understandings, together.

You can also read our ‘Upload FAQs’ for more details on uploading your own policies.

Is this site only for UK-based groups and orgs?

RadHR is a UK-based organisation and website, and has been primarily developed in consultation with other UK-based organisations and groups. That said, most ‘radical’ ways of working together are not defined by borders and there are groups from many countries in the RadHR Community who are working together to find answers to these kinds of questions.

Aspects of our Guides will include references to UK-specific laws, and the focuses of our blogs and events are likely to be grounded in UK contexts, but we imagine the majority of each of them will still be more widely applicable.

If policies or processes are shared by groups in other countries, we may take some editorial liberties to highlight if they include references to laws or contexts other than those applicable in the UK.

We think there are active benefits to groups thinking about these questions beyond their own contexts though, and will be making ongoing efforts to ensure connections and links with parallel or related work we come across that is happening elsewhere.

Is RadHR a consultancy?

In short, no, we are not. 

The core of RadHR is facilitating sharing and learning between groups that are figuring out how to organise ourselves in ways that centre care and liberation.

That said, the core team (and a select group of external facilitators) occasionally take on free or paid bespoke requests to provide:

1. Group workshops (around ‘radical HR’),
2. External facilitation of a group’s internal policy making process, or 
3. Critical feedback on an organisation’s existing internal policies.

The reasons we do these things are:

1. They helps us build deeper relationships with particular groups we are less engaged with, connecting them (and often, their networks) more actively into the RadHR community;
2. They give us close-up insight into the kinds of internal policy challenges groups are currently facing (which helps us understand how we can improve RadHR resources); 
3. They help us make up a limited budget shortfall not covered by grants, and to subsidise public resources and work with smaller groups that would not otherwise be able to afford it; 
4. In the case of working with funders or umbrella bodies: They give us the chance to influence an organisation which has the potential to impact a wide range of other organisations (grantees or members), if they are able to improve on their own policies or approaches.

Even as we take on limited work requests, the core team remains committed to focusing the vast majority of our limited capacities on supporting the community and creating resources that are available to everyone.

You can read more about the criteria in which we take on bespoke requests in this policy. You can make a request for facilitation or consultancy work here.

How can consultants engage with RadHR?

We realise consultancy can mean many different things. RadHR does very limited pieces of consultancy and facilitation work, but is not a consultancy. This is because we primarily aim to support one another to find collective answers to the issues all of us are having (rather than relying on outside ‘experts’ to solve complex group problems).

The kinds of HR consultants that charge a fortune to write policies for organisations, may find the RadHR policy library to be a free resource to reduce their own workload. If this sounds like you, please make a donation to the organisation whose policies you have used.

For the kinds of consultants and facilitators that work with groups and organisations to help them figure out ways of working that align with their needs and their values, we hope that the resources on the site can be useful reference points in your work.

What’s the structure of RadHR?

RadHR Ltd is a Company Limited by Guarantee with non-profit objectives, registered with Companies House (reg #: 13949867).

We want to be transparent about who we (the Core Team) are and how we do what we do. As the community grows, we want to support the emergence of structures that will make it easier for more people to be involved in RadHR in more ways. If you still have questions about RadHR after reading this, drop us a line and we will do our best to answer them!

Who’s involved in RadHR?

Right now, the Core Team of RadHR does most of the coordination and logistical work. But we don’t want this to be the case in the medium or longer term! The description below is somewhere in between a description of RadHR and an aspiration of what we’d like it to be.

Wider social movements and communities

Who?: Community groups, voluntary organisations, activist collectives, neighbourhood forums, workers coops, arts organisations, NGOs, trade unions, etc.

Roles/Involvement: Setting the standards for better and worse ways of working together towards a range of social change-related aims. Some groups are actively or implicitly reinforcing the systems of domination we find in the wider world, some are actively challenging them, the majority are doing some of both. This is the context most of us are operating within.

RadHR Community

Who?: NGO staff doing bits of this work by default, activists in collectives, members of community groups navigating power and care together, small NGO workers with HR responsibility, freelance voluntary sector workers, group process facilitators and consultants, etc.

Roles/Involvement: Uploading policies and processes; asking and responding to questions in the forum; writing blogs about experiences of this kind of work; participating in and shaping RadHR events; building relationships with others who are working in similar areas, or are interested in similar aspects of internal working practices and cultures; spreading the word about RadHR in their wider networks; organising local group meet-ups.

RadHR Core Team

Who?: Directors of RadHR Ltd, PAYE staff and freelancers working 2 or more days/week on RadHR projects.
Involvement: Building and maintaining the website; moderating and curating the Community forum; commissioning blogs from the community; approving and administering new member-uploaded policies and processes; communicating with the wider Community membership (email and social media); coordinating RadHR events; building relationships with frontline groups with lived experiences of the issues they work on; researching different ways of working together that align with RadHR’s values; defining a RadHR strategy, in consultation with others in the community; designing and delivering RadHR workshops for groups and organisations in the community and beyond; carrying out usability testing and trialling site adaptations based on feedback.