The Foundations of Decent(ralized) HR

Most people cringe when they think of HR. Stuffy bureaucratic practices intended to guard a company from litigation. It doesn’t leave much room for inspiration.

In my first office job I was fortunate to have a compassionate, free thinking, employee-advocating HR manager who gave me the opposite impression from most of the corporate world. To me, HR has always been about providing resources for humans, while many corporate HR managers just see humans as resources. Extractable resources, waiting for their value to be tapped & siphoned into company profit. In this new industry we have the opportunity to ensure HR is for us, for humans, prosocial.

And it’s not just about individuals being treated better. Without watering down the word colonialism, we can at least recognize that pyramid-shaped power structures prefer those who succeed in a power-over-others rather than power-with-others system.

Decentralized methods help us build more ethical & inclusive companies.

Decentralization spans beyond tech. It’s more than dethroning central banks. It’s more than running a DAppNode at home. It’s more than contracts executing based off of token governance. All these noble moves to decentralize the tech are accompanied by decentralization of the ways we operate socially. My first brush with decentralization principles came while working in Restorative Justice circles in 2014, long before I’d ever heard of blockchain. Restorative Justice (RJ) is an alternative to the criminal justice system in which stakeholders involved in a crime talk to each other to determine an outcome that restores safety, trust, and wellbeing. They don’t talk through lawyers, a judge, or even a mediator. Any of those parties would be a point of centralization. The point of RJ is for people impacted by the crime (including those who were harmed and those who caused harm) to talk to each other. This is just one example of decentralization outside of crypto.

In my work as a conflict facilitator I had some cases within working teams, and I can tell you that conflict resolution within a team is major surgery at worst and a visit to the hospital at best. Decentralized HR is preventative care.

And who am I? I’m Loie, and I’ve been providing Decentralized HR practices to crypto teams for the past 3 years. As you read on you’ll see some of my practical methods, and if your team needs support on this you can always reach out to me for consulting!

There’s many reasons to employ these practices, but first let’s get to how!

The 5 pillars of Decentralized HR

Onboarding & Offboarding

In a decentralized org this includes hiring and firing. The rituals by which someone is determined to be a fit or not a fit for the organization are themselves responsible for someone becoming an employee or not. Have you noticed that in many DAOs, people aren’t really hired? They just stick around and one day are core contributors. This is because a process is hiring them, not a person. And that’s ok! It works better when we name it & lay out specific guidelines for ushering someone in or out of a role.
Affinity groups, mentorship/buddy programs (read more below), agreeing to Mission/Vision/Values, open community calls, wikis, and heavy investment in community managers are all strategies that decentralized orgs use to make onboarding a success.
Successful offboarding processes, when not executed by a hierarchical management team, use roles processes and peer-sourced employee review. In this sense, the different pillars of Decentralized HR really rely on one another.

Employee Review

In trad companies, the most people can hope for is a yearly review executed by a manager who’s often too trigger happy with critical feedback, or completely unable to give it. There’s many reasons to source feedback from the collective:
1. Decentralization
2. Several coworkers provide a better viewpoint than one managerial person
3. Giving feedback is real labor — it takes knowing a person’s work intimately; it takes bravery; it takes careful wording. All this falling on one person means it won’t happen often enough, or that person will burn out.

Giveth has piloted a few experimental processes for peer-sourced employee review! In a decentralized budgeting experiment called The Unicorn DAC, contributors were onboarded to a counsel of “Unicorns” who decided how funds would be disbursed each week. In order to take this role, they had to have 2 “Uncles” — experienced Givethers who would vouch for them, mentor them, and help them take constructive feedback. An Uncle was a person you could always call upon if someone had an issue with your work, a personal conflict, if you were feeling lost on something, or if you wanted to excel into a new role.
Recently Giveth has seen a revival of this in a new Buddy System! Regular buddy review calls allow for asking “How do you think you could do better?” and “How can Giveth do better for you?” In the beginning, the buddies have a teacher-student dynamic, but over time shift towards being equals.
In another process we used at both Giveth and Commons Stack, peers reviewed each other’s work in a regular Roles Meeting. You can read about the details of the Roles Process here.

In this grand Giveth phone book of sorts, we kept each role listed with its purpose, accountabilities, domains, current projects, and more! It also functioned as a hiring tool as holes would appear, be described, and turn into roles that could be claimed.

Decision Making

This goes beyond token voting; a process for making decisions face to face is needed. Do all contributors in the org get to participate in all decisions? Do they have equal weight? Does someone have veto power? Are there any quorum requirements? Is there a facilitator role during decisions, and do they get a vote? What barriers are set up for conflicts of interest? These are all parameters that need to be clear even for decisions made in the moment by 5 people in a video call — not just for tokenized votes. One helpful model is called Integrative Decision Making, and it’s the native decision structure in Holacracy, one of the best-developed flat organizing structures we know.

Conflict Resolution

Through court systems and even parental systems, we are taught that a conflict is resolved by a 3rd party making a judgement or mediating. Any person through which conflicters communicate is a point of centralization. Instead, we can learn how to talk directly to each other.

I could write a whole article spinning off this, but instead I’ll let you watch this explainer.

Having a solid conflict resolution model in place in your organization is probably the #1 element to prevent ragequits, a social dilemma that all DAOs are prone to.
Having a solid model in place looks like:

1. One conflict resolution model is agreed upon — all members consent to use this as their justice system. There are many models to choose from, I only sing the praises of Restorative Justice because I believe it’s the most decentralized one.
2. There are facilitators who know how to lead the process.
3. All org members know who those facilitators are & how to initiate the process.

Employee Contracts

Agreement on what a contributor’s role, domain, and responsibilities are is essential to retaining good contributors. This doesn’t need to be a legal contract.
It can be built directly into the onboarding process/ritual. In a space full of anons & people that transcend legal boundaries, social pressure often goes much further than legal pressure. If your peers witness the agreement during your onboarding, this functions as more powerfully enforceable than even most legal contracts.

You don’t necessarily need legal contracts or even an intense onboarding ritual.

Meeting the same need that employee contracts satisfy can be as small as saying to a freelancer: “Here’s our incidental budget: 500 DAI — if you go above that amount of work debt without saying something, it’s on you.”
It’s all about setting agreed upon expectations for work vs reward — do that and your org will retain contributors.

These 5 pillars are the How of Decentralized HR.

These elements can be achieved at many different levels. Whether you are a funded project with a dozen or more contributors setting up HR systems so that you can scale the org, or you are a DAO of 4 members meeting twice a month in your free time, you can build each of these pillars to be strong. For those smaller/more casual teams, it’s a lot about asking the right questions. Read on to What Can You Do Now to see some of those.

Why?

There are both practical and philosophical reasons to set this work in motion.

Practically, we’ve got to recognize where we are at in crypto right now. If you’ve ever tried to hire for a project in the decentralization space, you’ve probably witnessed both these types of candidates:

• A builder who doesn’t want to commit to one project, be paid in fiat, or answer to a boss
• A builder who needs to know what to do & where they fit, get strong commitment, and is scared off by too relaxed of a hiring/onboarding process.

If we want to build the teams we need, we’ve got to meet them at their level. Especially now. There are more projects hiring than people ready to be hired. It’s a hiree’s market! Because of this, attracting and retaining contributors is paramount. This means appealing to their values as well as being organized enough to allow them to fit right into their workflow when they join, rather than being scared away by weeks of confusion regarding their employment status, what their responsibilities and their pay are, and who or what systems they answer to.

According to my twitter poll, nearly half of us working in crypto have no boss.😅 We simply can’t ignore how much this changes the landscape of management.

Even in orgs that don’t have bosses, there are still hierarchies. And decentralization can coexist with these. The key is to have a process at the top instead of a person at the top. You could look at this as an abstraction of “code is law.”

A process that all agree to is much less fallible than 1 person or 1 deciding body holding the power. We are better off naming the hierarchies that we do have (then we can optimize them) rather than pretending or wishing they wouldn’t exist. Having a process for each of these pillars will help you optimize those hierarchies.

Once in a meeting with Michael Zargham, I jotted down his words: “The mission, the values, and the execution all need to be pointing in the same direction.”

It voices this value I think we all know on some level: How we are within is how we are on the outside.

If we want to usher in a more just world through decentralizing stuck power, then we’ve got to model that in our own organizations.

↞ Hermetic Law agrees.

What can you do now?

This is nuanced work and you should allocate resources especially for someone to do it! Here’s a few tips though to get started building this knowledge into your practices now.

Ask, ask, ask!

Start conversations in your org.

How do we settle a decision in this team when the founders and the devs disagree?

How do I know if I’m doing well at my job?

What would it look like for a teammate to get offboarded?

Many projects will falter at these questions, and that’s good! That’s why you are asking them.😀 Getting these topics stirring in the minds of your peers will help you navigate it when you inevitably encounter these situations.

Exit interviews

People who leave your project have some of THE BEST insights as to why it might not work for some contributors. Draft a few questions about what it was like to onboard to, work in, and offboard from your project, and ask if they will grant you their time answering!

No-contract Work Contracts

They’re like no-bake cookies! Who doesn’t love that? 😉
Write down your understanding of what your pay arrangement is, and ask the other party “did i get this right?” Without going the full length of signing employee contracts, this simple exchange over chat will accomplish 90% of what a contract does.

Now that we’ve ended on the note of cookies… I’ll let you go. But if you’d like to learn more about this, follow Decent Human on twitter, or message me, Loie, directly!

PS:

If you are an HR, People Ops, or Onboarding person currently working in crypto, please dm me! I want to connect with you! 🙋‍♀️