As practiced by aequa Workshops Collective
Back in 2020, when we first founded the Workshops Collective collective and were still getting to know one another, founding member Liz Thamm offered up with the idea of creating something called a Personal User Manual. Since then, we have implemented this practice not only in our collective, but also in aequaâs various participatory working groups, so that folks can articulate at the outset how we can best work together.
Since then, this has become a more normalized practice, which we think is great! We wanted to share it with you. Since then, this has become a more normalized practice in many organizations, which we think is great! Here is our notion (internal wiki) page with some of the ways we approached this fun and connecting exercise. In our case, once we filled these in, we took a dedicated time each week to have one team member present their User Manual to the group, until we had seen everyone's, and new members got to present it as part of their onboarding.
The following text is written from Lizâs perspective.
At the end weâre also including some other organizationâs versions which might be an inspiration for you.
Toxic, corporate, capitalist, profit-over-people, patriarchal, white supremacist work cultures often expect us: to be clones, to be productive and creative 24/7, to always be available to answer emails, to work on 7 days a week, to be a wiz at everything, to be outspoken and extroverted, to be quick on our feet, to value constant growth at all costs, to sacrifice our health, to work in hierarchies in which we have little agency, to compete with our colleagues, to work on vacations, to pay for our mistakes or missteps, to prioritize work over other relationships or caregiving roles, to work in oppressive and abusive environments, to leave our whole selves at home, to turn off our bodily needs, etc.
Unfortunately, many of these cultures have also poisoned the way we work together in movement, too, which leads to burnout culture, and a tendency for systems of harm that we are often trying to fight against reproducing themselves within our movements!
This takes time to unlearn. In our collective we try to work against these capitalistic norms, for example: consensus decision making, taking walk and lunch breaks during our team meeting, giving and receiving honest feedback, having several periods per year of dedicated time off for the whole team, offering each other flexible working hours/times according to our capacities, highlighting our shiny moments, questioning urgency of tasks, checking in and checking out of meetings, and more!
With the Personal User Manual our focus is on us on an individual level: our personal ways of working and being & safety and equity within the collective.
When I was researching how people use Personal User Manuals at work I found out about Amy Edmondson. She is a social scientist / organizational behavioral scientist known for her work about psychological safety in the workplace.
âĄď¸ Caveat: like many mainstream peeps considered âthought leadersâ and resources out there, it's not perfect. In the research I did on her work I didn't see acknowledgement of systems of oppression, privilege, trauma, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.
"...professor at Harvard Business School, (she) first identified the concept of psychological safety in work teams in 1999. Since then, she has observed how companies with a trusting workplace perform better. Psychological safety isnât about being nice, she says. Itâs about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes, and learning from each other."
She gave a TEDx talk in 2014 called Building a psychologically safe workplace. In this talk she defines psychological safety as: a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or making mistakes.