Policy, rules. OK?

As a school governor, I’m keenly aware of the risk of drowning in policy. In schools, policy is needed on a range of issues, and all aspects of safeguarding. However small your school – and ours has three classes, total – you need the same number of policies, many of which overlap. The sensible thing to do would be to take a holistic view, combine and cross reference. But that takes time, and in a small school, where everyone wears many hats, that time is harder to create. It often makes sense to simply churn out the next policy to ensure that we are reviewing when we should.

The actual discussion tends to be a quality one. Less about basic compliance and more about whether the policy is communicated, understood and observed. But a couple of articles recently made me question the value of formal policies.

This one first, under the headline: Diversity Policies Rarely Make Companies Fairer, and They Feel Threatening to White Men. Now, whether we should be too concerned about the feelings of those that have tended to be hugely advantaged in the workplace is up for debate. But the findings here – that white men applying to firms that are actively pro-diversity feel under more pressure and perform worse – is an interesting finding.

What is more alarming is the concept that: “We can’t be discriminatory; we have a diversity policy”. That breeds complacency. It means that the people aren’t using the policy to challenge their assumptions or prejudices, they’re using it to reinforce them. That’s a policy that isn’t communicated, understood or observed.

This posting “Ditch Your Employee Handbook” was far more uplifting. I really like the coathanger analogy. But it was these two observations that stuck out for me. As we’ve seen above: More Rules = Less Judgement. And then the absolute nub of this all: Rules can’t keep you safe. It’s all about judgement, and that’s down to the individual. And it’s no surprise when the Nordstrom Employee Handbook is routinely referenced (even if it has been supplanted/exaggerated).

But what do we do when you’re in a sensitive or hard-to-navigate situation? If there could be safeguarding, legal or reputational damage? Can we rely on people to make the right judgements? Or rather, how do we support them to, whilst holding them to account if they don’t?

It’s a topic I intend to return to, but if you have ideas/observations, do share.