Dear FLOXiverse:

Care.

I’m going to talk about it again. And again. Because it’s that important.

In yesterday’s New York Times there was an article about infrastructure and care. It framed our national need to move forward -- as being dependent on investing in care. Of our families and each other.

In the newest issue of our favorite magazine, DEEM, there was a thoughtful piece also on care. And how as communities - we must ensure that we take care in all that we do and all the ways that we work.

Social sector work is driven by a desire to express care, to improve the lives of others -- and ourselves. Yet -- when it comes to building care into the infrastructure of our organizations, it can feel more like a machine of productivity. Meetings often feel highly pressured, emails even more so. Caring cultures are critical --- and to exist it means we need to design our organizational systems, structures, and strategies through the lens of care.

And we are seeing more examples of this -- recently, New Zealand made international headlines by legalizing bereavement leave for people who have experienced a miscarriage – making New Zealand the second country, after India, to offer this benefit. If we dig into what this actually means for people who have experienced this type of loss, we can begin to understand the foundations of (and the necessity for) care infrastructure in all levels of organizational structures.

Care infrastructure is a way of thinking about organizational infrastructure with the aim of designing policies and interactions with care, compassion, and support for the people in the community. In the miscarriage bereavement example, we take a step back from the typical aims of capitalistic “productivity” to address a very real trauma, that many people, often endure silently, with a sense of compassion. Care infrastructure creates policies with the inherent humanity of each community member in mind. It asserts that in order to build a healthy, productive, sustainable community, leadership must approach policy-making from a place of radical care and empathy.

Building an organization around care infrastructure requires leadership to practice deep transparency. From the budgeting process to feedback mechanisms and tools, to the HR policies that make up an employee handbook – folks who are doing the work at all levels of the organization need to be allowed to see how decisions are made, to feel empowered to offer critique, and to know that they are valued as members of the community. Leadership mustn’t solely focus on organizational policy and structural efficiency as the goal; rather the aim should shift to creating ease. Leadership should focus on developing an environment where employees feel comfortable, with a deep sense of support from the organization. On the whole, we must see employee wellbeing as being as important as efficiency and profit.

The first step in building this concept into a functional practice is to reframe designing the employee experience within the conceptual and practical methods of service design. Prioritize designing the way employees experience their time with the organization as a service. In their book “Good Services”, Lou Downe says that a good service “clearly explains its purpose...encourages the right behaviors from users and staff...clearly explains why a decision has been made” and “makes it easy to get human assistance”. These are some of the foundational principles to consider when building out interactions, communications, and policies that seek to uphold a care infrastructure model.

To start, organizations should prioritize ease for those with the least structural or positional authority. As the community grows and adapts, having eased the burdens on those with the least organizational influence will ensure that those burdens aren’t reabsorbed into the organization, and will allow for trust to develop more organically between staff, leadership, and decision-makers across the organization.

Care infrastructure is about humanity just as much as it is about organizational success. In fact, we would all be better served by determining organizations as successful not only by their financial health, but by the health and wellbeing of their workforce as well.

- sloan leo