Design procedures and guidelines

Karin Grasenick | 29 September 2021

The function of guidelines is to offer support for project members, users or any other target groups. It is the role of governance to consider if there is need for specific guidelines and why. These guidelines must then be produced and, most importantly, their communication and usage in day-to-day practice must be ensured.

Communicate constantly

Communication is necessary to sustain relationships.

While frequent communication is supposed to support trust and commitment in decisions and progress being made, this does not mean per se that they are fair or have been based on EDI principles.

However, within CoLIPRIS, just keeping everyone informed is already a challenge. Stakeholders loosely coupled might contribute to several different organisations. The information they receive daily might be overwhelming and distracting. Special attention should be paid to new members (employees, board members, …) and as there is no substitute for personal, face-to-face communication, especially in CoLIPRIS, additional channels are needed to guarantee that information is distributed fairly and equally.

Thus, communication in CoLIPRIS needs special attention. Relevant information must be made accessible and constant reminders to make use of this information are needed.

Such constant communication must include

• the EDI principles themselves,
• information on where to find them
• support in implementing them,
• and what happens if key principles are found to be violated.

Set standards for your operating procedures

A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a process that follows explicitly formulated and controlled steps. By setting a standard for these steps and assigning clear responsibilities, SOPs are a key element for quality control by offering guidance for everyone in an organisation.

However, it must be kept in mind that every standard, all strong regulations reduce flexibility. As such, the degree of regulation must be considered carefully and evaluated on a regular basis while guidelines, checklists etc. might provide more flexible approaches to communicate EDI principles within an organisation (see Table).

Examples for processes which should be more strongly regulated and carefully documented are

• recruitment and (s)election procedures for roles and positions within an organisation,
• key decision finding processes involving the distribution of critical resources,
• calls for new partners,
• conflict regulations,
• regulations against discrimination,
• compliance regulations.

Examples for processes which might need some more flexibility refer to

• co-creation of innovative ideas,
• design of public events,
• leadership principles that need to be adapted to different areas of responsibility.

Decide which guidelines you need

The function of guidelines is to offer support for project members, users or any other target groups.

It is the role of governance to consider if there is need for specific guidelines and why. These guidelines must then be produced and, most importantly, their communication and usage in day-to-day practice must be ensured. In the understanding of this process, guidelines and their usage contribute to capacity building.

This process implies that guidelines must be communicated clearly and regularly to the target groups to ensure correct usage. An example of such communication would be their regular promotion through internal project newspapers or in meetings.

The communication of such existing guidelines is one of the biggest challenges:
if guidelines remain unknown, governance might fail to implement higher visions or mission statements for values and norms on a practical level (see Table).

Another challenge concerns the difficulty to transfer guidelines into everyday practices:
often, guidelines might be too long or extensive for practical usage.

Especially in research contexts, guidelines on data protection or EDI-issues often do not meet researchers’ requirements. Researchers often face time pressure when working on new research proposals or applying for funding, and do not have time to acquire much background knowledge, despite a general openness for these issues. They need easily applicable and pragmatic tools that offer quick support.

Therefore, one solution for this challenge can be to develop dedicated guidelines which are specially designed for the project’s needs. For this reason, specific guidelines were created for the HBP, covering different areas related to gender, equal opportunities and diversity.