The Elements of Procedural Justice – Voice

I mentioned in last month’s newsletter that there are 4 elements to procedural justice. The first I want to talk about is voice.

All these elements are relatively straight forward when you read about them in isolation. As a leader you will recognise all the elements from your leadership training or the learning you have undertaken. You may feel your leadership journey has honed your skills especially on how you use your voice. As a follower you may hear a lot from those who lead you about wanting to hear your view or your opinion, but do you really trust that you can have a voice?

Voice in this context is not about a leader’s voice – it’s about how we give space to allow others to use their voice. Individuals need to be given a chance to express their concerns and participate in decision-making processes by telling their side of the story. This is a crucial part of any procedurally just process, but I believe we need to go through four-stages to get there.

Stage One – we need to create an environment which is psychologically safe enough to allow others to speak and to speak freely. I will come back to this in future weeks.

Stage Two – we need to ensure that people use their voice, they raise their concerns, their worries, their ideas, and their fears. That they feel they can contribute, drive change and can do so without shame or fear of being judged.

Stage Three – we need to ensure we listen. We don’t just hear, we actively listen. I was given a piece of advice in my first few weeks at work ‘you were given two ears and one mouth, use them in the ratio you were given them’. Hard (it was) but true. In short, the message was listen twice as much as you speak.

Stage Four – we have a responsibility to assimilate what we have heard and translate it into a way our business understands. Then we take it to the right place in our organisations.

This is easy, but it’s also hard. I know, a contraction in a very short sentence, but let me explain. It is easy to speak, to use your voice, if the conditions allow. It is easy to share your thoughts, your views and opinions, your fears, and worries, that’s the easy bit. The hard bit is creating the conditions to allow others to do that. We want to hear from people, we want to hear their ideas and their worries – it allows us to pivot our own leadership to deliver the outcomes our particular business needs to deliver. But we need to create a space, which is psychologically safe to allow that to happen and we need to allow others to tell us how they feel, and to tell us their side of the story.

It really can be that straightforward and we could end this newsletter here, but let’s look at some examples – from the world of prisons and from outside the Criminal Justice Sector.

How to start a riot – by not allowing others to have a voice

On the morning of Sunday 1st April 1990, a chapel service took place, there were 309 people in attendance. It was a routine and normal event, not much different to any other chapel service, on any other Sunday. But this service would make history and fundamentally change the way that one of the UK’s unseen institutions would be led.

On that day prisoners at HMP Manchester, known by staff, prisoners, and locals alike as Strangeways, decide they would take control of the prison, what followed was the longest prison riot in British penal history, leading to further and multiple disturbances across the country.

After the riot, which lasted 25 days, the Government commissioned an Inquiry, not just into Manchester but also those that erupted across the county. Lord Wolfe looked at different prison riots that took place in the early part of 1990 and published the much renowned Wolfe Report. It single handedly changed the way that prisons would be run.

In his report Lord Woolf called for ‘a reasoned explanation for all decisions adversely affecting individual prisoners and fair procedures for dealing with prisoner’s grievances and alleged misconduct’. To understand a reasoned explanation requires an active dialogue, for the prisoner to be able to speak about his or her concerns – to have a voice. It was clear from the Inquiry that prisoners were not being listened to about all manner of things that affected their lives. Time out of cell, clean clothes, the quality of the food and conditions in general. Importantly the prisoners spoken to sighted the relationship they had with staff as the issue – in short, nobody listened.

Prisoners stated that they raised issues, grievances, complaints – they used their voice, but nobody listened. We know that regardless of outcomes all of us need to have a feeling of control – when we are not listened to, we feel that things are out of our control. The simple act of listening to prisoners, those we manage and lead and the customers who may buy from us, is a key tenet to procedurally just processes.

Its staff survey time – we want to hear what you have to say

I’m going to use this example as a theme in these newsletters because I think that many staff surveys, in many organisations, provide a great example of why processes fail to tick the procedurally just box. Let’s start by asking a simple question – spend a few minutes before you read on thinking about this: why do we do staff surveys?

I read an article a while back that said the rise of the staff survey came about because we needed to listen to our staff, and to check on employee engagement, morale, and performance. That organisations needed to hear what was being said by staff and act upon that. But is this a fallacy, is there a different way to provide your staff with a voice.

As a leader I want to hear directly from staff (and prisoners), as I walk around prison landings and walk into offices, I ask questions, and I listen – regardless of how long it takes. My visits to prisons can take the whole day, I try hard not to book anything else on those days, because if I’m working to provide a voice to staff (and to prisoners), I don’t want to have to cut that short.

I ask questions like…what’s it like to work here, (or to live here), what do you need to make your job easier, (or to make living here easier), what can we do to help you do a better job or get better outcomes, (or to help you rehabilitate). A survey cannot tell me that, a survey can ask several questions that require a 1 to 5 response, they provide statistics that might (or might not) help me understand my business but is it the true voice of our staff groups?

Recruitment

You may have seen a post in January about the recruitment process for the new Governor at HMP Brixton – it was different from what we would normally do, and I think the candidates found it a little uncomfortable to all be in the same space when we provided a tour of their potential new workplace and an opportunity to talk to staff, prisoners, and the Senior Management Team (SMT). But it wasn’t about them, it was about HMP Brixton and what the staff, prisoners, and managers needed.

I briefed the SMT to be open and honest with the candidates and to tell them what they needed their new Governor to be and to do, how they wanted them to work. Feedback suggested that they felt like they had been part of the selection process, why was that? I think it was because we gave them a voice to speak about how they felt and what they felt the prison needed, it was their agenda and the candidates listened – we had provided them with a voice. Regardless of the outcome they had a part to play, they had been listened to and that, in short is what this is about.

Summary

All four elements of procedural justice need to be present to make a process or interaction feel genuinely procedurally just. We will build that over the coming months but providing a voice to allow individuals to have a chance to express their concerns and participate in decision-making processes, by telling their side of the story, is one of the most important aspects of this work.

I’m not a homework type of guy but if you want to, start practicing this element now. It’s hard in our busy lives to not listen or even think about the questions to ask, but I promise you, whether it’s at home, school, or work, asking a question and letting someone tell their side of the story will help build trust and respect, the second of which we will look at next time.

Thanks as always for reading and as always looking forward to seeing your comments.