Evolving our employment contract

4/5 posts reflecting on experiments in doing work differently

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We needed to reflect the governance and organising changes we were making in our contracts. When we pulled on this thread, the whole employment contract began to feel ripe for change. I joined Dark Matter Labs employment contracts peer group to further explore this potential. Reflections below.

Baby steps: iteratively updating our employment contract

💡 Why did we decide to do it?

• I made our first employment contract at the start of 2021, when Anneka and Sarah joined the team full-time. I borrowed the template from another organisation and edited it to make it work in the short-term.
• There were a few things about this first contract that didn’t feel like a great fit, from the language to some of the content. Unsurprisingly, we felt that developing a contract specifically for our needs would better underpin the culture and relationships we wanted to create.
• I also had practical (and legal) questions straight away. For example, can Huddlecraft encourage employees to change their pension to the ethical fund option? Presumably we can’t tell them they have to?! Is it too wooly to ‘encourage’ within a contract? And if so, where else should we put the encouragement? If we have a pay formula partly so that we can put our multiplier up or down depending on our circumstances, how would we talk about this unconventional approach in the contract?

🎥 How did it go?

• It’s always a real challenge to prioritise decent chunks of time to work on something like this, when there are higher priorities competing for space.
• So, I grabbed an opportunity to join an employment contracts peer group which was set up by Annette Dhami of Dark Matter Labs, as part of their Beyond the Rules programme of work. Huddlecraft joined other organisations including Healing Justice London, MAIA Group, CIVIC SQUARE, Catalyst, Collaborative Future and Chayn, each exploring alternative governance structures and organising methods in different ways. The group was a thought provoking and useful combination of peer exchange and actual lawyer expertise!

Employment contracts peer group

• Since participating in the peer group we made one new hire, which gave us the chance to integrate new learning into our contract. Whilst I do feel we moved things forward, doing this alongside other things meant that the work is not yet done, and there’s plenty more learning to integrate. Plus there’s still plenty of untapped inspiration and learning in the resources shared by the peer group.
• It looks like we’ll be hiring again soon, so that will give us another opportunity to develop the contract.

🎓 What did we learn?

• It’s not actually a legal requirement to have an employment contract. This really surprised me.
• Lawyers describe the purpose of the employment contract both in terms of reducing uncertainty and offering protection to both parties. They don’t tend to talk about it in terms of underpinning culture or behaviours.
• It was really helpful to think about the objective of reducing uncertainty. It makes total sense why a legal document needs to focus on doing this, and I reflected on how incongruous this can seem when there is increasing uncertainty in our environment. For example, with our pay formula, if a second pandemic were to hit, we could decide to reduce our multiplier for the entire team instead of making redundancies, to weather the storm together. This is the kind of flexibility which a pay formula can facilitate, but when writing this into a contract it might be tricky to do it in a way that creates total clarity. The more turbulence in our environment, the more flexible we might need our contracts to be — which is in conflict with the goal of reducing uncertainty!
• There are some things that should be in the contract itself, and other things that should be in a seperate appendix of policy documents, such as a maternity/paternity policy. This is the kind of thing that I feel a bit embarrased that I didn’t know. Maybe it should be obvious? It sounds like a lot of work, but actually it’s to save work. Anything which you might want to update more regularly than the contract itself can change within a policy document — and the contract can let people know that the policy may change. This can reduce lots of admin.
• It’s better to take baby steps forward than no steps. For example, we’ve taken some steps to go beyond statutory maternity and paternity leave, even though it would be a stretch if we needed to use it straight away. Doing this is ‘proof’ that we’re going in the direction we say we want to, even if we’re not 100% there yet. It’s a kind of tough love to ourselves, which keeps encouraging us to step up.
• 4–7 years old is a difficult stage for an organisation! Right now Huddlecraft is almost 6. It wasn’t so long ago that we were a start up, but we can’t really call ourselves that anymore. People can suddenly switch off the compassion tap and expect that you are instantly, magically able to match the policies of a huge corporate! But of course you can’t (especially if you’re a totally bootstrapped social enterprise).

👉 How will we take it forward in 2023?

• I’ll be digging further into the resources shared within the peer group.
• We’ll be hiring again soon which is the perfect opportunity for another round of iteration, and a good reason to develop some of the appendices we haven’t had time to focus on yet.
• We need a clear protocol to accompany the pay formula, to describe how and when we review the formula as a team, and steps we might take in times of abundance and/or scarcity.
• It would be great to do some further work on language and presentation, or perhaps create a visual front page to summarise the key points within.

🤔 Remaining questions?

• If the purpose of the contract is to reduce uncertainty, and our environment is become more uncertain and turbulent, will we reach a point in the coming years when contracting to create certainty simply becomes laughable?

🍭 Tips for others who’d like to do this?

• Pool your documents with some peer organisations who share similar values. They may have further developed some aspects of their contract that you haven’t yet and vice versa. Help each other get further.
• Also have conversations with people from these organisations to understand where they’re going next and share your next steps too.
• Talk to the people who are reading and signing the contract! What don’t they understand, how did they feel when they were reading it. What can this tell you about what you’d like to change?
• Check out Rad HR who are ‘working together to create radical, anti-oppressive approaches to HR and operations’ and who are creating a free, open library of policies and documents.
• Iterate and test while you’re small and it’s easy. And if you’re not small find other ways to iterate and test.
• Small steps are better than saving perfect steps for later. It’s better to give little bits of proof that you’re going in the direction you say you are, otherwise a lot of trust is required. Communicate what is required from your team and organisation in order to keep taking these steps: they aren’t taken by magic!
• Dark Matter Labs (with the Transformational Governance Project) are exploring how the employment contract peer group might be taken forward so it can benefit more organisations. Sign up for DML’s Beyond the Rules mailing list or join the Transformational Governace mailing list to stay in loop.

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