There’s something I’ve noticed over the years about organisational policies that exist in a silo, a bit detached from anything else in an organisation. These are often anti-racist policies, disability justice policies, environmental policies, or other policies which are grounded in a principle, and should be systemic and foundational, but often aren’t.
These siloed policies often sound like a manifesto or an essay more than a policy, and may have been drafted by someone with a clear commitment to the issue, but without the organisational power to integrate them into the organisation’s actual work. Or worse the organisation is just paying lip service to the issue, and wants something to be able to point at when the issue comes up.
These policies are often standalone, in that they don’t connect to anything more structural in the organisation, like:
- Decision making;
- Governance and structure;
- Budget and finances;
- Other internal policies where this issue is impacted and operates.
These siloed policies often feel a bit like the “We welcome applications from xxxx communities” statement at the bottom of a job advert (in an job advert that makes clear they’ve not done much more to actually welcome these communities). Or a day-long change to an organisational social media avatar as a form of solidarity (without any references to how the organisation supports that cause otherwise). These things might be nice, but in isolation, do little to shift an organisation’s practices.
Many of the groups I see working most on these issues—white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, climate justice—don’t have policies explicitly named after those things, because that work is integrated into the organisational policies that matter most. What does being anti-racist mean when it comes to pay? What does environmental justice mean when it comes to procurement? What does disability justice mean when it comes to time off?
These more operational policies are the places where an organisation’s values often get practiced most explicitly, so when we think about these wider ‘principle’ policies, the question I’m often left with is: “How does it shape what we actually do, day-to-day?”
When these policies do exist, the best versions I’ve seen often serve as an index: “If you want to think about being anti-racist in your work, these are a bunch of the places we’ve thought about what that could or should look like.”
But I’m wondering what else good versions of these types of policies might look like? And what your experiences are of these kinds of policies?
I do think there’s value in having a stand-alone agreed understanding of what, for instance, anti-racism can mean for that specific organisation, but only if this very clearly interacts with policies like the ones you listed - it acts as the centre of a spider web of systemic change rather than a stand-alone catch-all policy.
At my last employer, we did have an EDI policy which I worked on with an anti-racism organisation and a disability group, we really engaged with the practicalities of how this affected the day-to-day work with communities and also as an employer, one of the main issues was that the board didn’t have the time to engage with it so it almost didn’t matter how much work I did, it would just be scanned through and agreed without critical thinking of how it would interact with other aspects like employment law, and of course some of these things are held in place by the stipulations of funding like not being able to increase people’s salaries
I think the best I can imagine is where a change is made to an organisation’s understanding of something and they have a procedure for how that can start a review of policies e.g. it can trigger a review sooner than the scheduled one - and that the time and collaboration is there to do this with buy-in from across the organisation, not just the people making the decisions
Very happy to be in a forum of people who think that just putting ‘we welcome applications from ___’ is not good enough (I argued in a previous job that it was harmful if you haven’t done the work, asked them to take it off applications)