According to Gallup’s 2017 State of the Global Workplace report, 85% of employees are not engaged or are actively disengaged at work, a global labor “norm” that has the economic consequence of approximately $7 trillion in lost productivity each year. This global engagement pattern provides evidence we are going through a crisis of global mismanagement.

We spend most of the days of our lives working, yet, not many are the employees who feel truly satisfied with their jobs. Degenerative and unsupportive work environments, wherein hierarchal organizational structures, poor communication, extreme competition and individualistic “run for yourself” mentalities are normalized. Instead of functioning as tools to enhance our collective well-being, our exploitative job cultures and traditional employee-employer models of organization are further degenerating our social environments, deepening an already festering wound.

Thankfully, however, there’s a movement of people who are trying to change this labor standard through endorsement of so-called “horizontal organizational structures.” Recognizing that organizations can and should be a microcosm of the world we want to live in, this movement calls for deep structural change in the way we set up our work spaces. In order to have them function in ways that support our flourishing instead of accelerating the growing exhaustion of our personal energetic resources, the horizontal approach promotes the flattening of existing hierarchies and motivates more active, collaborative and participatory engagement from every single member of an organization’s team.

The pioneering work done by social designer, collective entrepreneur and collaboration strategist Samantha Slade has been laying the groundwork in the field, turning her into one of the leading figures of the movement. Author of the book Going Horizontal: Creating a Non-Hierarchical organization, One Practice at a Time (2018), Slade has come up with a vast array of concrete practices that can guide organizations into developing work environments whose organizational structures can help turn them into socially regenerative spaces.

In her Tedx talk, Slade explains how, given the situation of high complexity we’re in regarding our personal, collective as well as planetary health, we simply cannot afford to hoard our ideas, impact and profit to ourselves. As such, to the entrepreneur, business and organizations should function as a Commons: this is, as a source managed by a community for collective well-being for now and into the future. In this article you’ll find 3 concrete ways that businesses and organizations can function as a Commons, according to Slade:

1.     Compensation as Conversation

One of the ways we can re-create our work cultures is through implementing the strategy of no fixed salaries. Instead of following a model of pre-defined, authority-determined worth values, Slade suggests we integrate more transparent salary negotiations. At her organization, Percolab, an international self-governing network of for-more-than-profit codesign firms, colleagues negotiate their compensations amongst themselves on a project-by-project basis. Her annual salary, then, is the sum of all the financial agreements she makes with her co-workers in all the projects she works on all year. In her book, Slade argues that this is an important change to make since

“[t]he thorniest hot spot in financial transparency is compensation. Compensation gets at the very root of a hierarchical system, in which someone else gets to determine the value of your work. While the manager knows everyone’s salary, colleagues do not know one another’s salaries.”

To the author, the idea behind making the process of deciphering a financial compensation for one’s work more transparent is to also help people learn to talk about their own value, owning it, explaining it to others and challenging those that either underestimate or overestimate it. While this is not meant to be an easy process, it is considered to nurture fairness. From her experiences and investigation, Slade concludes that managing a company’s finances as a Commons with, for example, self-determining salaries and more social practices of reciprocity, leads people to become less self-centered and more collectively caring – all of which are believed to lead to more collective well-being.

2.     Collective Decision-Making

“Decision-making and organizational life go hand in hand. Decision-making is what keeps an organization moving forward. How can employees be fully engaged in an organization if they are not part of its decision-making? In fact, if organizations are serious about cultivating an adult-to-adult partnership culture where accountability stands strong and tall over blame and victimization, participation in decision making is how it happens.”

In Samantha’s Slades view, a truly regenerative work place is one where employees manage the company. That is, anybody within the organization can change the way it functions as well as its rules. The process goes something like the following:

1. One of the members of the organization’s teams suggests a new task, change within the organization, or so on;

2. They take this suggested task or change to a company meeting as a proposal;

3. At that meeting, the rest of the team is invited to engage and ask questions or make comments about the proposal;

4. The person that first suggested the task or changes only answers with the facts to what they know and is clear, and responds with ‘not specified’ to that which they have not thought through – this invites a fact-based process, with no explanations or justifications;

5. From there, everybody shares what they think about the proposal and all listen in return;

6. Once everyone stops reacting to the proposal, the person that first suggested it will have the opportunity to improve it. The idea is not to have a perfect product, but rather, that everybody is given the chance to share their opinion for recognition of the importance of various and alternative perspectives.

7. Finally, there is an objection round: if the proposal were to be enacted, could it bring harm to the organization? In this way, the matter perseveres as one of collective caring, not personal opinion. The objections are then integrated and the proposal is iterated further with them in consideration. “Good enough for now, safe enough to try,” is how they go about it at Percolab. This sort of self-management organizational practice distributes authority, giving clarity of responsibilities and maximum autonomy to each member of the organization. They create the space for everyone to lead and follow, depending on the moment or challenge to face.

3.     Not Everything Needs to be Transactional

So, in the organization Slade works in, they sell services that help companies become more participatory and co-creative, many of which they give away entirely for free and deliberately so. One of the ways by which they do this is by having open company meetings wherein anybody is welcomed to participate and learn about horizontal leadership through direct experience and practice. Be it a client, a researcher who is interested in alternative organizational practices, a person who is part of the wider international community that works in the field, and so on. The premise is that there is value in having different expertise domains and disciplines in the room since it increases the collective intelligence that is contributing to the company. More perspectives are understood as leading to more innovation, more strategy, more creativity, and more information. Slade and her team open their workspace up for people, not only to promote the teaching of organizational tools but also because they understand how necessary it is to embrace a culture of radical sharing. We live in times defined by catastrophes that were, in part, caused by our hoarding of ideas, money and knowledge. A way to resist the paradigm of vertical decision-making that excludes the person whose affected by the rules, we must embrace a business as commons, wherein the premise held is that we all gain more by sharing and helping each other grow, than compete in the process. We simply do not have the time. We simply cannot afford to do so.

As a social innovator, Samantha supports teams, organizations and ecosystems to work with complexity in order to stimulate a conscious innovation mindset, the result of which has proven to be enhanced creativity, greater growth, and increased employee retention and productivity in the work place. While her book is very business-oriented, its principles strike me as useful tools to apply across various sorts of interpersonal situations. If you’re aiming to form a positive, participatory and collaborative culture in any group setting, Slade’s work might be just right for you.

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Article by Helena Leonardo

Helena is a freelance educator and writer, trained in the fields of sociology and cultural studies. Her current mission is to take part in the advancement of the regenerative development paradigm through theoretical, empirical and active investigation and participation on the transformational potential of intersectional ecofeminism, community-building and the ecovillage movement.

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