Following RadHR reposting Jo Verrent’s blog about collective policymaking at disability arts organisation, Unlimited, Jo has shared a bit more of the details, practices and challenges that have come from trying to develop internal policies more equitably within their organisation.
How is your organisation structured?
We’re a charitable incorporated organisation (CIO). We do have a hierarchical structure. We have a senior management team. We have some managers, officers, administrators, and we have our first apprenticeship.
Why does it feel so important to you to create policies collectively?
It is the only way it can be if you genuinely want those policies to reflect the viewpoints of all staff and [for] everybody to understand them—actually understand them. Because reading them doesn’t mean you understand a policy. It means you’ve just skimmed through it in most cases. But having a collective understanding of it really helps.
Who comes to the policy-creation sessions?
All staff are invited to come to the sessions, but they don’t have to, and part-time staff will come to a proportionate number of sessions.
Can you say more about how the policy-creation process works?
I probably lead about 70% of the sessions, and if there’s one that falls when I can’t do it, then I’ll nominate somebody else in the organisation to lead that session. And as part of leading that session, you’re expected to do some pre-work [which] surfaces some of the big questions that you need to talk about in terms of ‘this not just [a] standard off the shelf policy. (For instance, about using the term ‘vulnerable people’).
We go through some of these questions in the sessions and come to some decisions together.
We’ve not had many situations where [it’s been really tricky]. I suppose when we come to expenses, that might be one. Some people think it should be this, and some people think it should be that, and then we would let the relevant team lead in that decision-making. So, for example, we had a big thing about lost receipts: what should you do if you’ve lost the receipt and the majority of people just wanted to be able to tick a box and say I’ve lost the receipt or whatever. But actually, the finance team said, “We do need some documentation because we’re dealing with public money. Our auditors will check. So, at the very least, we need a photograph of your bank account with the money going out.” That was one situation where the team wanted one thing, but… the finance team went, “actually this has to be something different.” So sometimes the team that it directly impacts makes the final decision, and then I (or someone else in the senior management team) will go to the HR consultants to get feedback on some of the legalities. And whether there are things we can’t do legally, or we don’t have the budget to do, or we’ll get ourselves into trouble if we do this. It only goes to the board if it has a financial implication—otherwise, it doesn’t because we see that as part of the operational running of the organisation. But if there’s a financial implication, then we have to take it to the board because we’re changing something about their organisation.
If there hasn’t been a substantial amount of change, or if we’ve been able to do everything we said at the meeting, then it just gets edited and shoved back onto the system, and we tell people it’s there now. But if there’s been pushback or things have had to alter from what was discussed at the group, then that’s where we might bring it back for a second kind of go-round in order to explain why some of the things that people wanted aren’t there.
What have some of the barriers to collective decision-making been? (and how have you addressed them)?
I suppose one of the biggest barriers is capacity. […] We try to do one a month, [but] we don’t do December, and we don’t do August. Quite often, we have to have a session where we’re coming back to a policy which has previously been discussed. So we probably only get through six a year. It feels glacially slow.
Our staff team is 17 people. It used to be 7. I think when we were 7, it felt much easier to manage, and I think there is something about having scaled up that has made it more challenging. 83% of our staff have a disability. So people might be ill. We also have lots of people working part-time, which is great but can have implications that come alongside it, particularly in terms of this work. I think if you want to get everybody involved in the policy development work and you have people who work part-time, we’ve had to say to some people, “OK, if you’re doing three days a week, then come to three of the five policy sessions. But actually, if you come to all 5, it’s probably taking up too much time.”
Even within the senior management team, not all of us go to everyone as a part of modelling that. So I don’t even go to every single one.
We always have them on different days, so at least there’s a chance you can come to some of them. Our core hours are between 11:00 and 3:00, so they have to fit with that, but it does start to really narrow down the windows.
We have a Slack channel, so you can leave notes there beforehand. You can ask questions there afterwards. We record sessions, and we take notes on them, so if you miss one, then you can watch the recording or read the notes or whatever. But I’m not quite sure how many people actually… have the capacity to go back and read them.
We have to accept that not everybody can come to everything. And we have to hope that there’s a collective, clear enough understanding of our organisational culture and desire for that to flow through, no matter who is there.
I absolutely don’t want to in any way suggest that it’s easy. I think it’s just one of those things… which is why people just go, “Right, we’re just not going to do it that way. We’re just going to have one person write the policies and get everyone else to sign it off. Whatever.”
What other things do you do to make it feel relevant and accessible to people?
Again, it (the challenge of access) really shows up in a whole load of different ways. Sometimes, it is about people not having the time to process the information. But equally, it could be that we’ve got to make sure if somebody’s coming, the access is there to enable them to participate fully.
We have a reading session, which is optional, one or two days before the policy discussion, where you can come together just to read through it as a group and check that everybody understands it. People wanted that, but actually, people aren’t going to it. But there was a real call for us to refrain from reading through the policy within the policy session because it just made it all somebody reading a policy out and no discussion. So I don’t think we’ve quite got the balance on that right. I think that in rewriting them, we’re trying to make the language much easier to read, but I don’t know the solution to the fact that so many of them are so boring(!).
[How many people come] really depends on the policy. For the data protection policy, the attendance was limited—even though it’s really important, it’s harder for people to see how we can adapt it. But parental leave, for instance, or sick pay, or expenses, are all well-attended—things that have a very personal, direct impact on the individual. And our safeguarding one actually was really well attended. [T]hat’s one that we might have to have two or three goes at because there’s a lot of changes people want.
What are some other challenges in doing this well?
I think it’s the once you’ve gone through one policy with different people, and different people have asked for different changes or whatever. Sometimes, when you’re writing up those changes, other questions come to mind, or they unravel something else, or people need to see where you landed.
What about going outside the policy?
There’s a big conversation about sick pay and whether we could extend it. We have a month’s sick pay, and then you are dropped down to statutory. And a couple of our staff said, “Well, we could use that really quickly with a really bad flare up and then we could lose our home because we couldn’t afford the rent if our sick pay drops.” People really wanted that extended, so we spoke to our HR provider, and in the end, we came up with another alternative. We now have a second month that you can kind of return to work where you don’t have to count your hours, but you slowly work your way back into work. And we’ve done that instead on the advice of our HR company, because if you’ve got a large amount of staff and a lot of people you know are ill, then that’s an awful lot of money (if you’re doing it for everyone). You’re really exposing yourself financially. But if a particular circumstance justifies it, we can give alternative provisions.
And we try to do that (go outside the policy) as little as possible because it opens up the question of why you have your policy in the first place. And it has to be done with great care and attention to make sure that it is equal. But there is a difference. For example, there’s a difference in rents for people who are city-based and people who might be living with their family or in very different kinds of circumstances. We have to look holistically at the whole person, and that’s where one-size-fits-all rules don’t necessarily work because they don’t consider people’s individual circumstances.
I think it’s really difficult and I think if we had a really big staff team, we wouldn’t be able to do it at all. I wouldn’t say we get it right 100% of the time. So how we do it is through discussions with our senior management team. So it’s not ever one person’s decision. We discuss it as a team and work out what might help in a particular circumstance. We sometimes bring in other sources of expertise. So, for example, we’ve got somebody who’s got a mental health support worker. They might suggest something that isn’t in our policy, which might particularly help an individual. We quite often look for things that are time-limited as well.
But again, what that takes is huge and as our staff grows [it becomes more difficult]
Anything else you’d like to share?
Just that we’re really aware that there’s so much that we’re not doing. The more we’ve started to engage in the conversations around life-affirming practices and policies, the more we realise what we’re not doing, which is really frightening because we think we’re doing a lot, but compared to some people, we don’t feel we are.
[For instance], we don’t run a four-day week because we don’t know how to do that. When you’ve got people with limited energy who already pace themselves, the idea of dropping Friday isn’t going to work for people who need to spread their hours over more days. And we haven’t yet found an Employee Assistance Programme that provides counselling and support. We’re looking into one, [but] our nervousness as a disability-led company is that their knowledge might not be [there, and] that they might do more harm than good. We had a bad run-in with Occupational Health for one person and don’t want to repeat that.
[More broadly] It’s kind of like that would be great if [every policy area] was done really, really well and carefully, but we haven’t got the time yet. I would say that the absolute hardest thing is that we can’t tailor a job to suit everybody perfectly because the jobs have already been tailored to the money that is supporting that job. There’s flexibility there, but the core of it we can’t shift because you have to deliver certain outcomes, and we’re getting money to deliver a certain number of things. We’re still part of that capitalist machine, and if somebody doesn’t do something, somebody else has to.
And that’s the thing I struggle with most at the moment. As more people are empowered to tell us exactly how they prefer to work, can we construct environments that enable that exact situation?
These are the things I struggle with. And I think, yeah, they’re really hard conversations, but we’re definitely getting better at them. But I don’t think it stops them from being hard.
