NEWS CALL FOR CHANGE
The Casey Review leaves no room for complacency, with lasting change to an entire culture as the top priority
Employers facing these kinds of scandals often do the same things: they deliver a strong message that bullying, harassment or any kind of discrimination won’t be tolerated. Staff found guilty of inappropriate behaviours and misconduct are removed. And from now on, they say, the values of mutual respect will be front and centre, repeated everywhere, on office walls, in internal comms, boilerplates, and HR materials. Policies are reviewed and checked for compliance and ways to meet levels of best practice. The new hard and fast values are backed up by training for management and other levels on equality and inclusion awareness and the insidious effects of discrimination.
The Casey Review has called for an overhaul of the Met, including improved vetting standards, powers to re-open misconduct investigations, specialist expertise being brought in to reform leadership, and more effort to improve levels of diversity made, backed up by regular and independent reviews into progress being made. Values, standards, even policies, don’t
make a culture. Very few staff would disagree with principles of tolerance, respect and understanding. But as many staff working in police forces know, that doesn’t mean a great deal, not in itself. It’s in the combination of everyday behaviours, the routine interactions and conversations, the remarks and intimations, private chatter and jokes, where problems are created. A build-up of an atmosphere in terms of what’s allowed, what’s okay, what’s funny — the kind of behaviours that go under the radar and are difficult to call out or criticise because they have become normal, and speaking up means becoming the exception. At the same time, there continues to be structures of power that reinforce and protect the norms. Changes to a culture won’t happen by
06 | POLICE | JUNE 2023
just reinforcing messages around values. Better systems for handling complaints are important, especially when it comes to offering more informal means of speaking up. But in themselves the processes are superficial if people don’t feel able to speak up in the first place, when they are only being made more anxious by the attention given to the seriousness of bullying and harassment issues. Rather than cracking down, just looking for blame and retribution, police forces need to be thinking in terms of building a positive culture based on everyday behaviours: what’s known as a Clear Air culture. What matters now are the all- important nuts and bolts of workplace behaviours. HR and leadership in police forces need to recognise what defines a workplace culture in more real, living terms — and accept that with a diverse working population there are going to be many different cultures, not one. In other words, a better way of developing a good culture is by clearly stating behaviours the organisation wants people to exhibit, supported by training in the skills needed — specifically around how employees interact with each other, how they share and understand and appreciate each other.
• Training staff in higher levels of conversation skills: empathy, curiosity,
In practice, that means:
• In particular, helping employees with the tactics needed for dealing with ‘difficult’
self-awareness, reflective listening and situational awareness, what is known as having ‘Conversational Integrity’ (CI); these capacities or skills are all fundamental, the real levers for what make an organisation or business perform better. If you want staff to able to be themselves in the workplace, they need to feel able to trust their colleagues.
• Setting up an internal mediation service run by trained staff that provides
or awkward conversations, how to anticipate them, prepare and approach them in a constructive way.
• Considering other informal channels which can be used to flag issues early
a more personal and informal outlet for dealing with conflict, and provides more employees with universally useful listening skills, a better understanding of workplace dynamics and how to appreciate different perspectives.
• Thinking about diversity and inclusion differently; not relying on awareness
on, making use of familiar tech, such as a reporting app on a smartphone to report inappropriate behaviours.
• Appreciating how people skills are important for encouraging a genuine
training around issues to be aware of, or trying to fix ‘proper’ forms of attitudes and behaviours. Employees need to feel able to be themselves and be appreciated as individuals rather than clones — an essential part of diversity and inclusion — but they need to have the people skills to present themselves and deal with others in mature ways.
sense of community and psychological safety, and are now more important than ever. That includes the ability to respond in the right ways to grievances and conflict.
Getting the behaviours right is essential to creating Clear Air cultures, where there is a genuine, everyday sense of trust and confidence in management and the processes involved in standing up for what’s right and reasonable. Not the flat, passive values, but living behaviours.
Arran Heal, Managing Director at workplace relationships expert CMP,
www.cmpsolutions.com
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