-Writing Policies with Purpose-

When I was growing up, we didn’t recycle. It wasn’t a ‘thing’ back then. That was a time when sparking caps with a parent’s lit cigarette while riding unrestrained in the back of a station wagon was a family vacation; when caring for the environment meant watering down the paint before dumping it into a storm sewer.

Sure we were destroying the planet, but we were blissfully unaware. Garbage was a simple two-step process: 1. Gather things you don’t want into a big bag. 2. Carry them to the end of the driveway on Wednesday night. Done. Practically magic. And although I now consider myself something of an environmentalist, a bag full of newspaper and tin cans vanishing from the early morning dew of the lawn will always be nostalgia.

Since then, science and authority have collaborated to develop a waste management system that separates our trash, recycles our reusable materials, and composts our organic waste. We have started, however imperfectly, to develop systems that at least consider the impact of waste.

What I like about this program is that it helps the environment. What I don’t like is everything else.

Composting and recycling requires me to sort my garbage. I’m too suburban to permit anything smelly in the garage, so I wash all the recyclable containers. What’s more, I wash them by hand, in the sink, which elevates them to the level of the antique dishes for how things get treated in my kitchen. Plate scrapings that should be unceremoniously banished get collected into a little bin, and I make special trips out to nestle them into the big bin of other things that disgust me. And that’s my own trash. My feeling about work recyclables is a thousand times less charitable.

If you didn’t get the subtext (it was subtle), I don’t enjoy recycling. I don’t enjoy it but I do it faithfully and meticulously because if I can’t eliminate my contribution to creating waste, I can at least participate in a program meant to mitigate its impact. I recycle because I know why I am doing it, and I support efforts to spare the environment.

What if no one had explained the purpose of the recycling program? What if one day an edict had simply come from the local government indicating it likes clean, organized garbage, and expects everyone to do the work to present such trash and to isolate anything that will get icky into a separate bin? Would I have complied?

Knowing why I do it doesn’t make me enjoy the inconvenience, but it compels me to continue complaining my way through the process.

In organizations, we know that the easiest way to gain compliance is to make the right way also be the easiest way, but that’s not always possible. Sometimes we are asking people to do things that are awkward, inconvenient, and icky. If we want them to do it, we have to tell them why.

We put the ‘why’ into policies as a policy purpose- we want you to follow this policy because to do so meets the requirements of our clients. Or it reduces our exposure to legal risk. Or it reduces your exposure to physical dangers. A policy purpose is such an important part of a policy because it gives the ‘why’ piece. It also forces the policy creator to think about that why in the first place- why am I writing this policy? What is it supposed to accomplish? Is it achieving the objectives I put in that purpose box? When the staff read Andrew Handley on Listverse and lose faith in this process, do we have any real measurements to show them?

But it doesn’t stop at the policy why. We must also have deeper conversations about why we do things. Those conversations don’t belong in policy- the policy purpose can’t contain a history of a problem and detail the ways the organization has tried to tackle it. It can’t be updated every time there is a new initiative to plan improvements or enhancements. There has to be some other space for that conversation.

There is no blind trust anymore. Employees don’t just believe that somewhere behind a closed boardroom door, their interests are being represented at the problem-solving table. They don’t believe there is a problem-solving table. If we who formulate policy are not talking about why we ask for things, and further, not sharing the conversations we are having about developing ways of making it easier for people to deliver those things we are asking for, then all we are telling them is we want the garbage to be pretty.

If all you’ve asked your people for is pretty garbage, you’ll need to have bylaw officers, and be prepared to face an entirely different toxic environment.