Hi!
I’m really interested in how other co-ops conceive of, structure and schedule all of the non-productive work that goes into maintaining an organisation.
Why? Because I wonder if we - at Common Knowledge - could be doing it better. By ‘better’, I mean many things: more spacious, more focused, more generative of ideas, more exciting, more satisfying, less fractured. These kind of things. By ‘better’, I definitely don’t mean more efficient, though if that’s a side-effect, it’s obviously welcome.
Quickly, just to define what I think about when I say the ‘non-productive work’, I mean everything that is done in your co-op that isn’t tightly related to the product or service that you sell in order to make money. Here’s one way to break that down:
Social. For example: organising and participating in a peer feedback framework
Administrative. For example: paying wages, processing invoices
Intentional. For example: running strategy workshops
I think what I’m most interested in at the moment is the temporal dimension of this: in your co-op, do you carry out some or all of this work in and around all of the day-to-day productive work of your organisation (let’s call this “continuous”), or do you bunch it up and tackle it periodically, like e.g. doing ‘regular work’ from Monday-Thursday and then everything else on Friday (“periodic”)?
Have you only ever taken a continuous or periodic approach, or have you tried both? Do you have a totally different approach?
Please let us know if you have any straightforward answers to the above, or any thoughts it brings up for you!
Currently continuous because I cannot predict when I will be engaged in client facing work. It depends on the nature of your “product” or “service”. Some co-ops have specific roles or parts of a person’s role that is dedicated to non fee earning work. I hesitate to call it “non-productive” because if you don’t do it your co-op fails. It is incredibly productive. I have witnessed the damage done by attributing value to work that earns money over works that doesn’t.
My suggestion would be to have a meeting to look at this and design a solution that works for your co-op.
Very interesting line of enquiry. My main experience has been in Calverts (graphic design and printing) over a long period of years, during which I saw both the thinking and the practice of accounting for and carrying out ‘non-chargeable’ work change, although subtly.
Some aspects of non-chargeable work became chargeable - for instance project management and consulting. Others started out as ‘co-op jobs’, i.e. roles that to start with were tasks shared and allocated to and voluntarily taken up by members on top of their ‘job job’ - such as HR, which Calverts always called ‘personnel’; health and safety; union repping; cleaning; environmental management; but which over time became part of particular ‘job jobs’. Finance, sales/marketing and production coordination were always ‘job jobs’. Then there were collective directorial tasks done through general meetings, subgroups, ‘task and finish’ groups and day-long time outs, but always valuing ‘water cooler’ dialogue, to the extent that we carefully planned the location of our kitchen/dining area to maximise the potential for casual encounters between workers from different departments.
We used review and feedback processes for non-member employees during their induction period (generally 10 months) - but not for members, relying on informal feedback and accountability to keep everyone flying right, and using fairly conventional grievance and disciplinary processes when the informal culture wasn’t enough.
The thread through time was that Calverts always thought of formal ‘management’ as something to be minimised, and informal self-management as something to be maximised; we always found formal management processes, such as meetings, to be something that sapped peoples’ energy and enthusiasm, while the more informal/devolved aspects were more productive (of both ideas and enthusiasm). This went along with allowing people to ‘grow into’ types of activity they liked, not forcing them to do stuff they didn’t (yet) feel confident about, but at the same time encouraging and finding opportunities for people to get out of their comfort zones (“how I transitioned from machine-minding and learned to love sales”).