rEHUMANISING oRGANISATIONS
Reimagining the relationships between organisations and people.
Every organisation begins simply as a vehicle to aid a group of people to achieve a shared purpose.
Somewhere along the way, things get flipped.
All of a sudden, the people are there to serve the organisation, rather than the other way round. Professional processes spring up like weeds, designed to ensure efficiency and consistency but all too often accidentally squeezing the life out of people.
76% of UK employees report moderate to high levels of stress. 55% of workers feel that work is getting more intense and demanding and 61% of workers say they feel exhausted at the end of most working days. 77% of employees worldwide are either not engaged or actively disengaged from their work.
Gallup - State Of The Global Workplace Report 2023
What we think of as normal organisational practice has accidentally become dehumanising: recruitment processes that everyone hates; meetings that should have been emails; emails that should have been meetings; waiting to hear what the boss wants before saying anything… But things don’t have to be like this. We can imagine our organisations differently.
How we human
At CIA, for us experimentation begins at home. For the past five years, we have been putting ourselves through the wringer trying to imagine and bring into being a different kind of organisation, one that supports but does not control people, one built on wellbeing and genuine relationships rather than productivity and managerialism. And we have got so many things wrong (so many things!). But through getting them wrong, we have managed to get some things right too:
Helping organisations experiment with new processes and modes of governance that operate along human first values
Supporting organisations and networks to build power-sensitive decision-making frameworks and processes that get decisions in the hands of the people best qualified to make them (regardless of hierarchy)
Walking alongside organisations who are engaging deeply with questions of equity, diversity and inclusion and working out how to embed those principles into every aspect of their work.
Developing spaces that allow the messy, beautiful people who are the organisation to flourish and grow.
Experimenting with building and sustaining The Collective Impact Agency as a company who embodies human first values
We’ve thought deeply about how recruitment practices contribute to systemic issues, and as a result we have rethought how we do recruitment.
We have built a ‘policy-light’ framework that focuses on autonomy and genuinely supports people working with us rather than extracting from them.
Our culture is based on non-hierarchal peer to peer support, constant collaboration, and trust. We make regular space for our relationships and for play.
We’re also reimagining the relationships between organisations and how those organisational relationships can be more human. We think exciting things happen when organisations network together and collaborate - so a big shout out to our sister organisation fractals co-op, who are playing in the sandbox with us, daring to repurpose these oddly shaped sand buckets and showcase how play can be an integral part of human connection and relationship building.
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