What makes a caring organisation?
Friends of Barnsbury Square Gardens
Everybody needs looking after sometimes. Whether it’s a phone call to check how we are doing, a cup of tea on a stressful day, or practical help with getting up, dressed and fed – the details and extent might differ between people and over our life courses, but fundamentally, care is something we all rely upon. Without it, nothing else can happen.
The question of how to organise the looking-after of people – or how to organise care in its broadest sense – is therefore basically a question of how to organise society so that people get their needs met. I think it’s therefore reasonable to think of this as an important question that should be taken very seriously when thinking about how to run organisations.
So, what makes a caring organisation?
I explored this question in my PhD thesis, which looked at the activities of grassroots community organisations in England and Wales during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Public World has published a short report from this research.
During the early lockdown period, many people relied on others in ways that they had not done before the pandemic. Whether because they were clinically vulnerable so couldn’t get to the supermarket, lost income and fell into food poverty, or needed companionship and social support to get through the months of isolation, many people’s needs were fast-changing – and in some cases acute. The country’s response to Covid-19 relied on these needs being met effectively. Much of the work of meeting these needs was done by community organisations.
Through my research, which involved interviewing people involved in 35 community organisations between April and July 2020, I found that the organisations that met need well were good at 1) identifying it accurately (including noticing when it differed between people and when it changed over time), and 2) responding fast and appropriately. In other words, these organisations adapted their approach according to real, diverse and changing needs.
Doing this relied on organisations being good at learning from their communities about what was needed. This happened when the workers providing support built relationships with the people who needed support. Through these relationships, the support workers learned about what people needed, how it was changing, and how different people’s needs differed from one another.
Then, the organisation used this information to make decisions about what to do. This happened when the views and knowledge of the ‘frontline’ workers were valued highly within the organisation, both at a strategic decision-making level, and also through trusting them to make their own day-to-day decisions about what to do in any given situation.
For example, one small befriending charity initially suggested that its services should stop during lockdown, but their volunteers fed back that their service-users would be lonely. The organisation’s two paid staff members listened to this, and took a proposal to the trustees who agreed for the volunteers to continue providing telephone support.
“[Our volunteers] were saying ‘we want to carry on doing something’. So, we were like, ‘okay, great’… All it needs is two of us to have a conversation, [the manager] to have a conversation with the trustees who are great, and then we are go. (Hannah, organiser, Get Active Together).
For an organisation to meet need it needs to be responsive and adaptable. People who do caring work, can, in the course of that work, develop relationships with the people they support. Through those relationships, they can learn more about what those people need.
If an organisation wishes to respond to need, it should therefore support those workers to develop caring relationships, and then take seriously the knowledge and expertise gained through those relationships. It is only then that the organisation can adapt according to need, and only then can it begin to be a truly caring organisation.
If you’d like to dig a bit deeper into this topic, please join me for an hour at 11 am this Friday 15 November, where I’ll be leading off the conversation at the Humanity at the Heart Community Cuppa.