Building accountability without abandoning anti-oppressive values

How do you hold people accountable without recreating the punitive HR practices you’re trying to move away from?

That question sat at the centre of our work with the Centre for Community Organizations (COCo). COCo was going through a lot of change. Its governance and leadership structures were shifting, new staff were joining, and within a couple of years, roughly three-quarters of the team was new. That brought some hard workplace questions to the surface.

What do we owe each other as colleagues? How do we respect people’s boundaries while still being clear about responsibilities? What happens when someone isn’t meeting expectations? How do we name harm without jumping straight to punishment?

COCo didn’t want to take a standard progressive-discipline policy, sprinkle some anti-oppressive language on it and call the job done. But avoiding punitive HR couldn’t mean avoiding accountability either. That was the tension.

Like many organizations, COCo wasn’t without its history, which included conflict that often stayed under the surface, alongside a sometimes conflict-avoidant culture. Anyone who has spent time in nonprofits probably knows some version of this. Someone isn’t meeting expectations, but nobody says much. People get frustrated. Colleagues start talking around the issue instead of to each other. A manager hopes things will improve. Everyone is trying not to make the situation worse. Until it gets worse.

By the time someone finally has the direct conversation, months of frustration may have built up. What could have been a manageable conversation now feels enormous.

So we didn’t start by writing a policy. We started by listening.

We reviewed COCo’s existing policies, structures, governance materials and evaluation practices. Then we engaged staff, leadership and the Board to understand how people actually experienced feedback and accountability inside the organization.

We brought what we heard back to people, too. They could challenge our findings, tell us what we missed and help make sense of what needed to change before we developed the new evaluation approach.

Somewhere along the way, the project became about much more than performance reviews. It became about feedback culture.

What if someone didn’t have to wait until an evaluation to find out there was a problem? What if feedback happened often enough that difficult conversations weren’t automatically big conversations? Could accountability include reflection, learning, repair and support while still allowing an organization to say, clearly, “this caused harm” or “this expectation isn’t being met”?

We think so.

There’s a false choice that shows up in the sector sometimes: either we practise care and anti-oppression, or we hold people accountable. Those things aren’t opposites. Sometimes avoiding a difficult conversation in the name of care creates more harm later.

COCo came away with a new evaluation framework, but the bigger shift was in how the organization could think about feedback, responsibility and workplace relationships.

Florencia put it well:

“We came away with more than a policy. We have a framework that helps us think differently about recognition, accountability, and workplace relationships.”

That gets to the heart of this project. COCo already had deep experience with anti-oppressive practice. They didn’t need us to explain why equity matters. The harder work was figuring out what those values require when things get messy.

Because they will.

People miss expectations. Conflict happens. Boundaries bump up against organizational responsibilities. People disagree about what accountability or repair should look like.

A values statement won’t tell you what to do next. Your organizational practices need to. That’s where this work lived.

Interested in exploring an equity audit with Evenings & Weekends? Reach out to book an intro call!