Three Ways Your Organization Can Build Fairness And Justice

How can decision-making transparency, inclusivity, and effective communication improve business outcomes across your organization? How can you ensure justice and fairness within your teams and across departments?

How decisions are made in the face of unrelenting changes is a challenge for every leader or business owner. Decisions made during mergers, acquisitions, audits, layoffs, and promotions place the question of fairness in the foreground. Our organizational decisions often have a lasting impact — for ourselves and those around us. For inclusive leaders, pressure runs high to do what is in the best interest of those we lead and what makes good business sense.

Research shows that the best organizations rely on what scholars call procedural justice. Procedural justice is intricately connected to organizational justice. It refers to the perceived fairness of an organization’s processes used to formulate outcomes, such as pay, promotions, and performance evaluations. It focuses on how decisions are made, who has a voice within the decision-making process, and how those decisions are communicated companywide.

When we incorporate procedural justice into our organizations’ decision-making processes, those we lead feel included in how the numerous decisions affecting them are made. Procedural justice assists with collective buy-in, giving space for fairness and organizational transparency.

The ultimate benefit to your business? People who see their organization treat its employees with fairness tend to be happier and healthier at work, leading to lower turnover and absenteeism and a rise in worker engagement, knowledge sharing, and innovation.

How can you assess the strength of your company’s procedural justice practices — or lack thereof? Ask yourself these three questions to see if you’re on track to building a workplace that values honesty, transparency, and trust from the top down, bottom up, and all roles in between.

1. Do We Ask For Employee Input On Company-wide Decisions?

Research has shown that organizations that allow workers input on processes and procedures are often viewed as fairer and more just than ones that do not. It is this perception of fairness in organizational processes that allows workers to disagree with outcomes but remain content with their employer and their role within the business.

Organizations that look only to their executives or leaders to make final decisions should expect workers to feel less valued. Employees who believe their opinions are unimportant to decision-makers report lower morale and higher burnout rates and heightened disengagement.

Massive benefits await businesses that incorporate employee input. Integrating all levels of employees within the decision-making process boosts feelings of fairness. Indeed, companies that adopt mechanisms for true company input report not only a healthier organization but spikes in revenue, lower costs, and an increase in innovative idea sharing.

2. How Do We Give Our Workers Opportunities To Voice Their Opinions?

Businesses looking to build a procedurally just workplace must have formal methods for communicating with internal stakeholders and gathering their feedback on organizational policies. This ensures that leaders hear from the most voices before making any final decisions, while demonstrating their commitment to cultivating a fair and inclusive work environment.

Here are a few ways that organizations can give workers opportunities to provide feedback:

It’s also important to ensure that collecting worker feedback is not a one-time event, but a repeated process of asking for feedback, reviewing it, and then implementing necessary changes. And be forewarned: By missing this last step — making actual changes to internal processes that reflect employee input — organizations can damage worker trust and risk losing employees altogether.

3. Are We Willing To Course Correct When Necessary?

Once organizations start adjusting based on employee feedback, their commitment to listening and making changes is clear, resulting in increased worker buy-in and engagement. But what about a willingness to fine-tune processes and procedures to align with new information or to correct missteps?

Being open to revision is equally important to ensuring just processes. The key is to demonstrate humility and welcome follow-up input from those we lead through surveys that can help us analyze any gaps between desired and actual outcomes.

This willingness to fine-tune, combined with applying decision-making criteria consistently, providing timely feedback about decisions, and adequately explaining the basis for decisions, increases worker perceptions of a fair and procedurally just organization.

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash