Consistency for Inclusive Organisations
Bridging Consistency and Change
It is hard to create a value system held by all within an organisation, not to say impossible. But it is also questionable whether diverse value systems should be allow to wander too far and detract from an otherwise coherent narrative across an organisation. After all, an organisation’s brand — in the broadest sense — could become hard to identify and engage with. An organisation whose values are manifold and unpredictable will become a source of uncertainty for people when considering to work with it — whether an employee, an investor, a buyer, a supplier… But variety of value systems within organisations is inevitable. The question is, then: how might such value systems fit with one another? Might there be a value that can serve as some “glue”, if you will; holding those value systems together? And might this value be consistency?
Defining Consistency
Intuitively, consistency is a useful approach to business management. On a traditional account of organisational theory, it can be seen as how we should perform — “consistently hitting the mark”, “growing at a consistent rate”. On a somewhat more modern approach to organisational theory, it means applying policies and treating staff consistently. I call this consistency as fairness.
Consistency as fairness
Consistency as fairness is about treating all members of staff — and potential recruits — equally, and applying organisational policies in a consistent way. This is prima facie quite consistent with legislative requirements. In the UK, we might think of the Equality Act (2010) and not discriminate on the basis of any “protected characteristic”. However, this understanding of consistency as fairness downplays its more positive aspect. Consistency as fairness, as I see it, is not about not discriminating, but going a little further and striving for equality. Equality here means making sure that, for example, all members of staff — full-time, senior, junior, part-time, “casual workers” (not “employed” in the legal sense) — have access to the same benefits and opportunities. The mention of “casual workers”, I hope, emphasises that consistency as fairness is not about doing the “bare legal minimum”. Another way we can see this is by thinking beyond the Equality Act’s protected characteristics. One important feature of the UK’s economy, for example, is great difficulty for upwards social mobility — the so called “postcode lottery”. “Social mobility” is not captured by the Equality Act’s protected characteristics. To this effect, consistency as fairness is truly about treating all people equally given the policies and values in place at an organisation. However, this raises concerns similar to those of “colour-blindness” when discussing the role of race in society: colour-blindness is blind to the specific lived experiences and marginalisations of different social groups by some “race” category. Abstracting this to treating all equally regardless of — amongst others — class, race, gender and age really amounts to stripping the identity of those we encounter when applying organisational policies. To this effect, consistency as fairness is ultimately blind to people’s identities — disinterested, if you will, about human life.
Consistency as fairness is a very practical notion of “consistency” as an organisational value. It serves as an approach to the application of policies across a company, and possibly the design of new policies. However, it is ignorant of those “organic” value systems that “emerge” beyond formal policies. An example value system can exist within a certain department in a company’s formal structure. A certain marketing team might value a welcoming workspace over the need to be in the office at all hours. One sales team might take more time to explain the details of a product to customers, whilst another prioritises hitting key performance indicators by being brash on calls due to the competitive environment their manager has created. An so on. Value systems are, then, the conglomerate of values that are shared — more or less explicitly — by groups of people within an organisation. These groups needn’t be formal teams, but might form through interdepartmental relations, or even by hierarchal position — senior staff may have a unique value system (not that I’d know). The problem is when these value systems diverge and the organisation loses credibility as a cohesive structure. Consistency as interoperability could help with a lack of cohesion.
Consistency as interoperability
Serving as a “glue” for inevitably diverse value systems within an organisation, consistency as interoperability means finding aspects of different value systems that do prop one another up. Consistency as interoperability can be conceived in two ways. Firstly, it can be seen as the centralisation of some narrative. By this account, consistency as interoperabilitymeans finding how value systems meet certain features of an organisation’s “formal values” — those we might find in their strategy reports and job adverts. Secondly, consistency as interoperability can be construed as allowing an organisation’s values to be more emergent and the result of finding the narrative that links different value systems together. However, each version of consistency as interoperability raises important questions. On the one hand, the centralised version fails in the same way consistency as fairness did. It amounts to imposing certain “formal values” on others’ value systems — it detracts from the very value of others’ value systems. It can also mean “posing” or virtue-signalling. Consider the marketing team’s welcoming approach to work. The (very) positive aspect of such a value system might be taken by the the “formal values” as a sign of the organisation’s ethos — the organisation will claim, in other words, that it is a welcoming workplace when, really, that is only true of the marketing team. On the other hand, building an organisation’s values on the basis of a narrative that emerges by tying in different value systems can be convoluted and confusing. This might be inevitable anyway, but a larger problem is at hand: how do new value systems tie into the narrative? Is the goal to accommodate for all new value systems? This certainly doesn’t seem right (I list values in the below image that an organisation ought to counter and dispel immediately). But how might we let go of emerging value systems that are simply not welcome? I want to suggest a third notion of consistency that accounts for the emergent feature of value systems within organisations and allows for a process to vanquish what value systems are out of place.
Consistency as change
Consistency as change is an oxymoron, but I hope it conveys the importance for the formalisation of value systems in organisations to acknowledge the changing nature of informal value systems. Consistency as change amounts to embracing the fact that we cannot expect all value systems within an organisation to “fall in line”. There will be value systems that are incommensurable. Consistency as change means taking this incommensurability and building a stronger formal value system in light of it. It means having processes in place for employees to voice their value systems and have these taken seriously. Now, I do not wish to prescribe how this is done, but the goal is not to create conflict. The goal is to have a process that allows for the identification of potentially clashing value systems. Consistency as change means consistently considering the implications of different value systems. The mention of “implications” highlights the role I have been seeking for consistency from the start: it is a value for the creation of cohesive organisational values; a “meta-value”, so to speak. Consistency as change is not how organisations must design policies and procedures, but the overarching value system that upholds the rules of an organisation.
Concluding
I have introduced three notions of consistency for the design of organisational values. Firstly, consistency as fairnessamounted to the equal application of policies to all people involved with an organisation. Unfortunately, it fell foul of a form of blindness towards individuals’ identities. Secondly, consistency as interoperability sought to find narratives that linked diverse value systems within organisations. However, it either ended up failing before the same problem as consistency as fairness, or raising questions when it seemed to be too accommodating and to not provide any cohesion whatsoever. Consistency as change was then introduced as the need to embrace the changing nature of organisations and their value systems. Unfortunately, no clear guidelines were produced for the implementation of consistency as change. But I hope this provides some food for thought when you encounter discussions about organisational values.
