What happens when you accept an employment contract? What are the unspoken and unexamined things that happen when a new person is recruited into an organisation? In this third episode of Corporate Bodies, Mark and Kate explore the feudal history of employment contracting, and how that plays out in working cultures today.
They are joined by Liam Barrington-Bush, a co-founder of RadHR.org, to explore the challenges and dangers of not looking closely enough at how we welcome new people into companies. In a wide ranging conversation, they cover the problems with traditional recruitment processes, the optimum size of organisations, and the “exponential complexity” of bringing new people into a team.
They talk about the impact of practices from social movement spaces becoming more mainstream, and it’s important to consider power when thinking about new ways of working. The conversation includes some practical steps organisations can take today as well as some larger and more challenging provocations.
Resources:
RadHR.org is a wonderful repository of HR policies and includes lots of very useful guides.
Read more about the history of employment contracting here, and about the development of thinking about organisations as machines here.
Read the article accompanying the episode here.
Liam mentions the work of Maslaha and Transforming Together around Radical Safeguarding.
Liam wrote a great book called Anarchists in the Boardroom which you can read here.
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Presenters:
Kate Swade (she/her), independent organisational development and governance consultant
Mark Walton (he/him), Founder and Director, Shared Assets
Interviewee:
Liam Barrington-Bush (he/him), Director, RadHR
Editor: Katie Revell (she/her)
Artwork: Hanna Norberg-Williams (they/them)
Supporters:
The series is supported by the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), which is a cutting edge research organisation based at the University of Surrey. CUSP explores the question: What does prosperity mean in a world of environmental, social, and economic limits? For more details, visit cusp.ac.uk.
