High Trust – High Responsibility
Within Home for Good and Safe Families we have a wonderful staff team whose skills, knowledge and experience enable us together to work towards our vision. We want a culture in which we are empowered to play our part and the freedom to work well within our teams without unnecessary barriers and restrictions. We therefore want to work from a place of ‘high trust, high responsibility’ within our teams and within our practices. But what do we mean by high trust, high responsibility?
Trust is the firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something.
We as a staff team are stating a position of choosing to trust each other (and those we partner with). We choose trust first.
Responsibility is being accountable. We are all accountable to each other and to do the job for which we are employed.
How does this play out in practise in our policies and the day to day of how we work? Below are some examples of ways we have / are seeking to move more toward High Trust- High Responsibility, we would however love to hear of more places in which you think this currently is working well; and also those examples that you think isn’t starting with these principles.
- Flexible working (and future core hours proposal)
We will be trailing a ‘flexi-time’ scheme with core hours (more information to come in November) – within it we won’t expect you to run every tweak to your hours past your line manager – If you need to go to an appointment at 4pm / take the children to school we trust you to make that decision and work your hours appropriately. We also trust that you will take the responsibility for ensuring that other team members and the work we need to do is considered in your decision – do the right people know? Is there cover?
- Expenses policy
Within the Safe Families expenses policy (these policies have not yet been combined but we want to operate this approach across both) we have outlined the principles by which we want to work (ie. We want to be a generous employer, and we want to be excellent stewards of the money that we receive). We have not set fixed limits for the policy because we trust you to employ these principles with a high degree of responsibility.
- Compassionate Leave
We have widened the definition of compassionate leave to enable the principle to drive the decisions. We have recognised that detailing how many days leave can be given, based on strict guidelines does not enable time to be given when it is needed most. E.g. for some of us a close friend has been ‘family’ to us. We trust that you are able to identify who the immediate circle of support is for you, and therefore where eave is needed.
High trust – High Responsibility only works if we are also willing to enter into the difficult conversations that are needed when we don’t align with either of these principles – either when we behave in ways that stop assuming trust and/or when we don’t act in ways that take responsibility for the part we have to play. This can feel uncomfortable, sometimes we might get it wrong, and we will need to apologise for that, but we must we willing to have those honest and robust conversations.