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Read the original policy here:
https://radhr.org/policy/conflict-grievance-accountability-policy/
I’m looking for a policy on Voluntary and Involuntary transitions. I work with democratic workplaces and sometimes folks are struggling to set collective limits that they can actually implement, like specific pathways to support a member of the team to transition, after performance improvement plans that didn’t produce desired outcomes.
Hi @AnaM - thanks for posting this. Such an important question! Just to clarify, when you say ‘transition’, I’m guessing you mean ‘ending the employment relationship with a worker’? If so, this is something we’ve worked to strike a balance on in our ‘Work support’ policy, as have also seen and been part of many groups who have struggled to know when they can’t actually offer sufficient support for a worker’s needs.
It’s always super hard to handle these situations, but having clarity on your collectively-agreed limits in advance is so important. One of our key elements has been to make it clear that performance issues don’t get sent down a disciplinary pathway. Our alternative has been to include a different path to dismissal that comes after a wide range of clear available supports have been offered and exhausted.
Happy to discuss this, as it’s such a common - and messy! - issue in non-hierarchical groups!
Also very curious to hear what others are doing on this front - we’d just sent an email out about this recently and keen to gather any collective wisdom from the community around this.
Oh cool thanks for sharing the Work support policy, it does look very supportive for the type of challenges folks are encountering for sure. And yep, I mean transitions like ending employment, and also ending membership from a cooperative. I support folks working with small cooperatives (sometimes 3 members) and medium sizes (10 + ). We encounter many times cooperatives that have formed from different forms of people’s economies “economias populares in Spanish” (family own businesses, gig economies, entrepreneurs, etc) and with folks that have limited access to employment (legal status, criminalization, etc.). So it is already hard for folks to get to work together, how to translate polices into actual practice and culture becomes a real challenge! In the U.S. we use a lot the language of worker ownership vs. associate member when we talk about worker cooperatives (and I understand that ownership it is important when we come from places of dispossession). Ownership can be a real challenge when (we) people feel and believe being owners means nobody can tell (us) what to do. So implementing practices for accountability is challenging. That is why I use the word transitions and not just ending employment since legally a lot of these workers are not employees, but co-owners. Still I found the policy you shared very very helpful and I probably will be adjusting the language to reflect the relationship among these workers, but in short we are trying to craft language to set up those collective boundaries to support creating a culture of accountability within these conditions. When I’m done I can share in the forum the language we come up with 
Thanks for sharing the extra context, @AnaM - would be great to hear more about your work, as the kinds of co-ops you’re describing are, I’m sure, needing to figure out creative ways of handling these sorts of situations, when there is so much precarity built into members’ contexts, even before introducing work struggles.
And if you’re up for sharing anything you develop here, that would definitely be a great resource for the RadHR community to have access to. While some of the legal frameworks are likely to be different in the US and UK, I imagine there is far more common ground to build on here!