Creating the conditions for our teams and organisations to work well isn’t easy. Neus, who is part of Ulex’s Team Culture Circle, spoke to people from RadHR to hear what they are doing to help movement organisations develop effective and value based systems that can help.
I’m curious about your name. What was the thinking behind that choice? Is it useful to reproduce the language of humans as resources?
So the RadHR name is a bit tongue-in-cheek. It felt short, memorable, and like it wasn’t taking itself too seriously. What’s nice about it is that it starts from a position of radicalising the mainstream, as opposed to utilising language that may feel more radical but is perhaps less accessible. It gets the point across, so in that sense it does its job. I think there was a real desire to avoid jargon wherever possible – policymaking can already feel really intimidating to groups for a variety of reasons, so we wanted to bring people in where we could as opposed to making things feel harder to understand than they really needed to be.
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 our work and the site is about figuring out ways of working together that align with more progressive and liberatory values, rather than reinforcing the power dynamics of the status quo.
At Ulex I’m somebody that has tried to systematised processes and write everything (nearly!) down. There’s other people who live on the other side of the spectrum and also bring a healthy concern about the possibility of “bureaucratisation”. Is this a tension/challenge that you see in your work? How do you work with it?
I think it’s a totally fair concern around bureaucratisation. As you can imagine, many of us at RadHR are very into codifying things – and I think it’s fair to say that most of us come from backgrounds where we were the ones in our respective groups keen to create systematised processes. But there is that balance to be had, and more and more we’ve been appreciating the tensions between what gets written down and what doesn’t, and how codifying stuff – while sometimes really serving to ensure more equitable practices, as you can ensure things are applied in a more standardised way – can also sometimes fail to capture the implicit ways people are looking after each other while doing this work. I know that I’ve definitely pushed for policies to be put in place in previous groups that have actually served to flatten some of the really interesting practices that were occuring, and that policies couldn’t capture. Often these are the practices which are rooted in care – and how do you codify care, when it is such a responsive and flexible practice?
Our answer so far has been to try and develop projects that explore some of these tensions, so we can kind of ring fence the time and space needed to grapple with them. So we have a research project happening with People Support Coop at the moment which is working with worker cooperatives, and we’ve also just launched a research project called ‘Beyond Policies’ which is trying to capture exactly what you’re speaking about – the bits that can’t be written down, but are still so important. We’re speaking with individuals from larger voluntary sector organisations where often the HR is fairly ‘trad’, as well as smaller frontline groups, to see how they manage these challenges and what might be useful for them in terms of support and resource; trying to find ways that RadHR can support the more implicit stuff. Ultimately, we just want to feel like what we’re doing is as useful as possible to as many different kinds of groups as possible.
Policy Library
In our “Transformative Collaboration” course we share a model called Task-Process-Relationship triangle. In short, it’s about considering that a group needs to appropriately balance attention to task (vision, goals, projects), process (structures that support coordination) and relationships (trust, quality of communication, care…). An appropriate balance is not giving the same attention to all, as the context and environment the group is in might require different responses (working to a big deadline or new people joining, for example). I see that RadHR clearly supports with the “process” part, by offering a collective library of policies, and really useful guides to make them. Is this your sole focus? Or do also support organisations to think about the other two dimensions?
The short answer is no! Haha. We have been very conscious of not replicating work that is already happening, and there are some really fantastic groups in the (for lack of a better phrase) ‘movement infrastructure’ space who are able to support with those other two things, especially in terms of relationships. But I love the idea of a triangle, and they really are all linked: Often questions will come up in our workshops or on the forum where people are looking for support or information that extends beyond our ‘process’ remit, but is still really relevant to the work of policy and process-making – what we’ve tried to do in these cases is ensure that we’re signposting to the relevant groups (we also link to consultants/facilitators in our ‘support section’ of the site here). Part of what has felt really important in the past year, especially as we’ve become busier, is to ensure we avoid doing that thing of eating up funding and space, when really it feels important to ensure that the movement infrastructure sphere is more sustainable as a whole. There are great groups doing this work, and finding ways for all of us to be more connected feels really key.
And now a very specific question around finance! When I look on the website, the questions around pay/wages are about how to make it more equitable and fair. At Ulex we see waged labour as one of the oppressive elements of capitalism and try to find our ways around/beyond it. We try to ask ourselves what we need to feel supported and live a good life, so that we have the personal resource to dedicate our time and energy to the work we want to do. I wonder if you have any thoughts about how you bring a radical approach into relationships that are shaped by waged labour.
It’s so complicated. Pay is always a big topic – it’s just knotty, and can bring up so much for people. And especially where groups may have staff facing multiple forms of marginalisation, it can be really hard to strike that balance between ensuring everything feels equal, and ensuring everyone is being met where they are.
I guess the answer is twofold. Firstly, there is no one way to approach wage labour radically – the most radical thing is really to approach the matter of pay in a way that is attuned to your particular group. At RadHR we use a flat pay structure + uplifts that cover different things like disability, city living, etc., which we’ve found is what works for us as a small team. We have some great pay policies to draw from in the library, but ultimately it’s about addressing these questions collectively in your groups wherever possible, and always building in more time than you think you need for those conversations (easier said than done when funding and capacity are so often stretched!). Part of this is also ensuring you build in points for reflection/rejigging – if you are developing a pay policy, put in a time a few months down the line to check-in on it together. Keep things responsive wherever you can, don’t just make a ‘perfect’ policy and then leave it in a folder somewhere. Often we learn so much more from what didn’t work than what did.
Secondly, in terms of a radical approach, I think a lot of it comes down to what you said – what do people need to feel supported and live a good life? That personal resource piece is so important – often this kind of work can be really emotionally draining, so making sure people are supported through fair pay can be the difference between people being able to work without burning out or not. In previous groups I’ve been in there have been so many of us taking on part-time work elsewhere just to sustain our organising, because we didn’t want to take on a higher wage – and then that just leads to exhaustion all around. There was so much burnout during the pandemic, especially for groups doing more frontline support – so in that sense I think it can be radical to pay people really well wherever funding allows, even if it feels tricky to ask for a certain day rate or a certain salary.
But it’s a big question and I don’t know if there’s a right answer, really. The thing about RadHR is that, as I said earlier, we aren’t HR professionals. We don’t necessarily have the answers, but what we do have is the ability to facilitate space where people can raise questions. So I think that is generally the approach we take, especially in the forum. We just try and open some of this stuff up to explore it together.
What are you excited about? Any work developments you’d like people to know about?
Lots of things! We just hit 10 new policy uploads in a month, which feels like a real milestone. It definitely feels like it’s gone from us approaching groups and asking them to share things to groups really feeling confident enough to upload things themselves, unprompted. Just to see that in action feels huge, and I still get a real rush of excitement if I read a new policy that’s come in that would have been particularly useful to me in a previous group or something – there’s a real feeling of ‘this would have been so helpful to have at the time, I’m so glad people can access this now’. It just makes me so happy to be a part of something that feels genuinely, immediately useful in that way.
Beyond the library, we’re continuing to run workshops, and have been doing some longer in-person ones, which is always really enjoyable after years of Zoom rooms. We’ve also got another Lunch Meet coming up in December which we always look forward to.
Also as I said before, we have also research project ‘Beyond Policies’ that launched in May. We’ve launched a survey here which we’re hoping will inform how the project develops – we have a few ideas around potential collective mentoring sessions or perhaps co-designing some shareable resources, but we really want to leave it up to those participating. So if you or someone you know is working in ways that are about looking after each other, but perhaps not written down, please do fill it out!
There’s generally lots going on, and I’ve probably missed some things here, but the best way to stay up to date is by signing up to the RadHR community: Stuff often pops up in the forum, and that way you’ll also be signed up to our newsletter, so you can find out what we’re up to via your inbox.