Making sustainability sustainable
Over the last couple of years at Bristol Climate & Nature Partnership we have been working to embed and bring to life our organisational values; impact, collaboration, courage and wellbeing. The result? A set of principles that we believe make for an inclusive, joyful and collaborative workplace. Today we’re sharing these principles and our journey to co-produce them with the aim of providing some insights into how to make working in sustainability more sustainable. We hope you find them helpful.
Why wellbeing is important
People are central to our work, and we want to ensure that we are able to work sustainably in sustainability – with space to breathe, learn, share, grow and work in flow.
In our sector, people feel the emotional burden of the transformative change we are trying to make, alongside the broader societal pressures which are lowering people’s resilience. These both contribute to the risk of burnout.
To support wellbeing and a positive work culture, where all our people are valued and cared for, we have co-produced principles for an inclusive, joyful, caring and collaborative workplace. These principles support our values and are complemented by our organisation’s formal policies and procedures. They represent a shared aspiration at every level of the organisation to bring our values to life and truly embed them into our individual and shared working practices and culture.
The climate and nature crises have come about through systems that rely on extraction, of both people and natural resources. At the Partnership we see addressing these crises as an opportunity to also address these extractive systems, and to make our city a better and fairer place to live and work. Making sustainability more sustainable is part of the wider system change we are trying to achieve as an organisation, and is essential for a just transition.
We can’t change everything overnight, but there are things about the way we work that we can change and influence right away. These principles focus on what we have control over as well as some ambitions for the future that may require more long-term planning and funding.
Working collaboratively to develop principles
Work to embed wellbeing in our workplace is ongoing. It is necessary to get the basics right and so our work culture principles are underpinned by a living wage, supportive policies and practices, staff benefits, and wellbeing days where we spend time together to do something creative and connect to nature. It’s also important to acknowledge that any wellbeing intervention needs to come after or alongside ensuring staff workload is manageable.
These principles arose from our work to understand how staff were feeling and what would best support their wellbeing.
Our process to develop them was:
- Research. This work brings so many themes together and we drew inspiration from a lot of places including our own projects and partners, and further afield. Here is a great reading list from the Radical Rest Network as a starting point.
- Listening. We surveyed staff to understand what they appreciate about working for the Partnership, where there are areas for improvement, and to explore options for how we can embed our wellbeing value. The survey showed the two most popular interventions; one was around planned organisational down time which requires longer term research and exploration by senior staff and the Board. The other was around organisation wide modelling of our wellbeing value. We focused on this in the more immediate term as all colleagues can have control over it.
- Reflection. We held a team reflection session to give staff an opportunity to share and listen to each other around the themes from the wellbeing survey, help reflect on our work culture and shape what we want it to be.
- Co-production and co-ownership. We drafted the work culture principles based on the above input and held several workshops with staff to shape and develop the principles and consider how we can further embed them and keep them alive.
“I enjoyed collaborating with my colleagues to collate views and perspectives into this set of principles we can all own and be proud of. I am delighted to share these principles publicly which aim to bring our organisation’s wellbeing value to life in practice. I would welcome conversations with others who are also interested in making working in sustainability more sustainable.”
Ceilidh Jackson – Baker, Communications and Engagement Manager and working group lead for Making Sustainability Sustainable
Work in progress
This work is not frivolous, it underpins how we want to work with each other, and with all our partners. It’s also not easy, and a continuous work in progress. We care deeply about the work we do and the change we are trying to make and are also committed to meeting the requirements of our funders, supporters, partners and members.
We hope that by sharing our principles for an inclusive, joyful and collaborative workplace we inspire more organisations to work towards a just transition – sustainably.
Keep an eye out for a wellbeing focused Climate Action Programme event later in the year, and get in touch if you want to explore improving wellbeing in your workplace.
“In the fight to avert disaster, our people are the most precious resource. Practitioners, organisers and activists, in community, are the ones who will make survival possible – but only if we can bring radical rest, restoration and community care into our movement.”
Tamara Toles O’Laughlin, founder of Climate Critical Earth
Share to
