Thank you for joining me for this next segment about standardizing processes in order to bring sustainability and equality and community to your organization. This is one of the things about HR that can be just like, like awful when standardization is done in a way that it is oppressive and it sweeps things under the rug and it is an extension of sort of like a risk mitigation arm of an organization. And that is useful. That is not something that we're going to be talking about today though.
So what we're talking about in standardizing processes with this goal of sustainability, equality, and community is that when processes are not defined, they are random. And when things are happening at random, there is more of a chance of unconscious bias to make its way into how things happen. And there is more of an opportunity, like a bad opportunity, to treat people differently in different situations. And so what we do when we standardize is that we have practices for handling different types of requests that come and different kinds of systems that are related to people.
So an example of this, let's look at hiring. So maybe you've hired a team and it turns out that the team is a homogeneous group of people. And so you're realizing that you're not being reflective of the totality of the population that lives in your county. And so you want to address the process around hiring so that there is more fairness and equality in hiring in your organization. And so one of the things that you can do is to have an operating procedure that outline show you are reaching out into the community for candidates, how you're interviewing people, and how you are on boarding or welcoming people into your organization. And that can look all different kinds of ways depending on what your goals and your process is and what your company does.
But there are kind of some best practices, HR best practices along the way. This works similarly for having conversations with people about how work is going in the HR world. They call this performance reviews. I think that there's an opportunity in all of these different functions that belong to HR for them to be community building rituals rather than these like really charged and intense sort of like dissonance creating conversations. The one way that this manifests is when someone goes through a hiring process and they're offered a position and then they start working in an organization and that feels different from what was told to them through the hiring process. Like you want to reflect the actual realities of the job through the hiring process, so that when someone is hired, they're not like, oh, this is really different from what I thought that it was going to be. That's a part of the standardization is being able to really accurately reflect throughout all the pieces of an employee's cycle with the company, what happens along the way. Community building and relationship building rituals. So there can be a ritual for someone's first day, there can be a ritual for gathering together after someone has finished their training and after someone has spent their whole first year with you. And there can be rituals that happen at different times of year so that you have sort of these markers that bring people together at those times. And you can have standard processes, rituals around what you do if things are not working, and if there need to be more difficult conversations around how to reach goals, like agreed upon goals that everyone has, or goals for the organization. And this can all be done in a way that is trauma informed and that reinforces the community of all of the people that work with you, and reinforces the community that sort of flows out from your company, all the different people that you touch, like your clients and your vendors and all these different folks.
So there's kind of a lot in standardization, but one entry point to standardization that can be helpful is to the way that I look at it, is an employee handbook, which is really like a foundational document in the HR world. And it touches on basically all of the agreements that you have with staff. And by going through the practice of putting an employee handbook together, you can learn a whole lot about your sort of responsibilities as an employer. And you can make choices. There are so many choices that you can make along the way about how things work and how you want things to work in your organization. And so if you have any questions about this. Or you're interested in talking with me. Or just having a standard operating procedures conversation. Or figuring out how to sort of align all the different. Like maybe questions that you're getting from staff with some processes that can work for you. That can help to save you time and help save money and all of those things. Then just reach out. I'm happy to have a conversation about that. And I hope that this sort of explanation about how standardizing can support both being trauma informed and providing equal opportunity for your pupil, I hope that it's been helpful for that.
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