Introduction

I have found prioritising kindness and wellbeing the most challenging thing I have done in libraries, both because of the myriad interpretations of what kindness and wellbeing mean and because people think it should be easy, when it is hard. This chapter looks at some difficulties libraries face when making their workplaces kinder and more focused on wellbeing. While it's a great goal, this book has identified many positive reasons. Several challenges can make it hard for libraries to do this successfully. We will explore these challenges and discuss ways to overcome them to help libraries be places full of books and where people feel supported and cared for.

We’ll look at how the behaviour of others and the role of leaders in the library can affect bystander syndrome (Latané and Rodin, 1969) and suggest ways to help staff feel more confident and responsible, such as through mindfulness and promoting supportive leadership. We will discuss what causes the burden of caring for others and how libraries can help their staff through training, balancing personal interests with care for others and creating a work environment that supports their staff's wellbeing. We’ll examine how wanting to succeed can sometimes lessen compassion and look at ways to encourage a more caring approach, including training for emotional skills, creating a culture that values kindness and changing how the library operates to support this.

Libraries, significantly smaller or less-funded ones, often need more money or staff to start wellbeing programmes. We will explore the effects of these limitations and suggest solutions like using their resources wisely, getting the community involved, developing low-cost wellbeing programmes and thinking carefully about how to use their funds.

Introduction

Kind communication, closely linked to concepts of civility and non-violent communication, is a way of interacting with others that emphasises respect, compassion and empathy. It's not just about what is said, but also how it's said. It's essential in any workplace, but it's vital in libraries. In a library, staff work together to help a wide range of people and manage lots of information. Talking to each other and the people who come into the library in a kind way makes the library a better place to work and visit.

Library staff often have to work as a team, help people who come in and keep learning new things. All this depends a lot on how well they communicate. Communication can help staff in different parts of the library work better together, make the library more friendly and create a welcoming environment.

In this chapter, we will look at why kind communication is so important in libraries. We’ll focus on non-violent communication as a structured way of being kind. We’ll see how it can make the library a better place to work and make the people who visit it happier. We’ll also share some good ways for library staff to communicate kindly daily. We aim to help everyone in the library – staff and visitors – feel more welcome and happy. This chapter is here to help library workers and leaders understand how to make their library a place where kindness is a normal part of everyday life.

Introduction

The start of everybody's journey working in a library is the recruitment process. Traditionally, this will have been stress-inducing, candidates unable to show their best side as they are trying to navigate unkind processes where adverts may close early, job application forms are all different, interviews are arranged at short notice with no idea who they are meeting or where to go. They are expected to be at their best when faced with questions they have no idea about and then, after all that, they wait days to find out if they have got the job. This can hugely impact the wellbeing of the candidate by stressing them out, especially as there may be many reasons that they are looking for a new job, some of which could be fundamental to their lifestyle such as financial or family needs.

We will address post-recruitment practices, highlighting the importance of feedback and relationship-building with candidates. Challenges and practical solutions to help implement kind recruitment in various organisational contexts will be discussed. The chapter will conclude with methods to measure the impact of kind recruitment on the organisation and its employees, ensuring that the practice of kindness remains a core element in the recruitment strategy. Additional resources and reflective questions will be provided to encourage the reader to engage actively with the concepts and integrate them into their own recruitment practices.

Reflective questions

■ How does your current recruitment process align with the principles of kindness and fairness?

■ Reflect on a recent recruitment exercise you conducted or participated in. In what ways could it have been more candidate-centred?

Introduction

The phrase ‘I just did what anyone else would do’ is often associated with acts of remarkable courage. The prevailing attitudes in many workplaces could be improved. Common refrains like ‘You just need to be more resilient’, ‘It doesn't sound that bad’, or ‘You cannot win, just let it go’ indicate a culture that shies away from confronting issues (Marcum and Young, 2019). Even in seemingly benign environments like libraries, I have seen first-hand how deep-rooted problems can undermine efforts to nurture wellbeing.

Despite organisational declarations of integrity and honesty, the harsh reality can be starkly different. It is startling that 69% of whistleblowers risk job loss and blocklisting, even with protective policies (Marcum and Young, 2019). This toxic atmosphere extends beyond whistleblowers, subtly affecting employee morale and causing moral distress. As Ahmad and Klotz (2020) observed, unethical behaviour tends to have a more profound effect on employee wellbeing than ethical behaviour, underscoring the importance of conserving resources for maintaining employee wellness. Any organisation is only as good as the worst behaviour it tolerates.

To counteract this toxicity, we must champion courage and kindness. Toxic workplaces, riddled with silence and fear, hinder open communication and personal expression, leading to a stifling work culture (Schilpzand, De Pater and Erez, 2016). This impedes organisational growth and drives away nontoxic staff, potentially leading to elevated sickness rates, as reported by the CIPD in 2022.

Welcome to a transformative journey that redefines our approach to work in libraries and workplaces in general, reshaping our professional practices and how we think and interact with each other. This book isn't merely a collection of theories; it's a call to action, urging us to revolutionise our workplaces into spaces where kindness and wellbeing are deeply embedded into every aspect of our daily lives.

My fascination with kindness and wellbeing began as an exploration of theory. It quickly became a profound realisation: the principles underlying these concepts are deeply intuitive and remarkably simple to implement, provided there is a genuine commitment at the organisational level. This realisation made me commit to improving workplaces for everyone, starting with those I know best: libraries.

Looking back, I realise my understanding of kindness at work and its impact on wellbeing started at the University of Brighton. There, something simple like making tea for each other brought us together. We’d have tea breaks where we’d chat and laugh, which made us feel like a team. These small things showed how much we cared for each other and the camaraderie was something I saw in other library teams who similarly made the effort to connect. There was trust, safety and respect for each other's strengths. Another significant aspect of my early work life was flexibility in working hours, a cornerstone of my wellbeing philosophy. This freedom, exemplified by always having the desk covered and contented students, reinforced trust and commitment, emphasising that small acts of kindness and trust enrich a workplace.

Introduction

You may have heard that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’, but what does it do to wellbeing? It eats it for lunch, dinner and every snack. During my working life, I’ve witnessed first-hand the profound impact that workplace culture can have on every part of a library – from the wellbeing of its employees to its overall effectiveness. Within an organisation, culture is not an abstract concept but a living, breathing entity that shapes our daily experiences and long-term outcomes. It can change and evolve and when leaders aren't mindful of this, it can often change for the worse, but toxic cultures are the focus of a subsequent chapter. This chapter explores the complex interplay between workplace culture and the twin virtues of kindness and wellbeing. I aim to show you the unique challenges and opportunities librarians and staff encounter when fostering a work culture rich in kindness and conducive to wellbeing.

Can culture really affect wellbeing?

In 2022, Huhtala et al. reported on a longitudinal study of the impact of ethical organisational culture on the wellbeing of leaders. In this study, they used the Conservation of Resources (COR) model (explored in detail in Chapter 2) to examine the impact of an ethical culture on the wellbeing of their leaders. Leaders in organisations with a strong ethical culture reported better wellbeing. Specifically, they experienced lower levels of ethical dilemmas, stress and burnout and higher levels of work engagement. Over time, these positive factors slightly improved. The improvements were not as substantial as the negative impacts seen in environments with weak ethical cultures.

Introduction

I really believe if we invest in our teams and ensure they are given every opportunity to develop and grow, we will be doing our best for them and the services we offer. Simply put, the world around us is developing constantly and if we invest in our teams, we will find that they become skilled, engaged and in turn their wellbeing will improve. This chapter explores the crucial role of personal development for library staff, emphasising how these aspects significantly influence their contribution to a positive workplace culture. It argues that nurturing individual growth benefits the staff and enhances the library's overall service quality and environment. It will also explain how to integrate key wellbeing models – ASSET, PERMA, JD-R and PsyCap – into library staff's personal development and self-care, exploring how these models can enhance their contribution to a positive workplace culture and improve overall wellbeing.

What happens if we don't invest in personal development?

A possible result of not investing in personal development is that our teams will rust out (Howard, 1989). Rust-out happens when someone is not feeling challenged or interested in their job anymore, causing them to be less productive and lose enthusiasm. Another result could be the team struggling to get roles elsewhere because they are deskilled and become increasingly resentful of the roles they are ‘trapped’ in, which can create negative ripples.

Incomplete contracts

Once the state chooses to outsource public services, the outsourcing instrument – usually a public or concession contract – becomes the key mechanism for the extension of public control over their private delivery. The success of outsourcing then ‘hinges on the viability of the outsourcing contract as a fully effective junction of instruction’ between public authority and private provider. But given the complexity of many public services, the contractual governance mechanism has some inevitable limitations. Bar perhaps in the simplest procurement of public goods, it is quite impossible or impossibly costly to anticipate all contingencies and service obligations in detail in the contracting instrument.

Certain contingencies are unpredictable (such as a natural disaster or economic crisis), and others are difficult to foresee (such as unexpected or unaccounted needs). Yet other elements are ambiguous precisely because they relate to quality-related service standards that are non-contractible, as is often the case in relation to personalized services – as in the care sector, where services rely heavily on qualities such as maintaining a sense of patients’ personal dignity, trust between patients and carers, and continuity of care. These often depend on standards that relate to organizational values as much as the more tangible conditions of their delivery, such as the employment conditions of carers. While the latter can at least potentially be specified in a public contract to some extent, the former are harder to define and enforce contractually. This poses a double challenge of predicting both contingencies and how a specific provider might react to them.

Given the incomplete nature of complex public contracts, the need for adaptation will arise as gaps and ambiguities in the contract emerge. Ideally, the contracting parties will fill these out by informally renegotiating their relationship without negatively impacting the quality of service delivery. But an important factor to consider in this context is that successful adaptation can be considerably more difficult in the case of public contracts compared to private contracts. The reason lies not in any distinction related to scale or complexity, nor in how much uncertainty there is to tackle, or in what form. On these issues, private and public contracts give rise to broadly similar difficulties. What is different is the typical incentive structures in the contracting relationship.

Primary objectives

Where the state decides that the market cannot provide certain goods or services in sufficient quantities or quality, or in a sufficiently just distribution, it considers whether to take political responsibility for their provision as a public service. This includes, most obviously, security, education and healthcare, but also potentially other essentials like transport, water, energy and electronic and postal communications. In deciding whether to assume any particular responsibility, it determines the public need and the opportunity costs of meeting this need as a public service, balanced against other priorities and the quantity, quality and distribution of the same goods or services by the market. Whether and to what extent it should intervene is a political choice for which it must be accountable politically.

The extent of these political choices varies. In healthcare, for example, the US model historically encourages markets in health insurance and healthcare services, while European states tend to take political responsibility for health as a public service as part of a state-funded system. How these choices evolve is not always linear or predictable. A change in political leadership or an external trigger like a global crisis can bring about sudden shifts. For example, COVID-19 caused many governments to take on unprecedented levels of responsibility for the provision of healthcare equipment and services. Conversely, the global financial crisis in 2008 led many states to shed responsibilities to rein in spending.

Just because the state assumes responsibility for a service does not mean that it must become the provider. It also decides whether to deliver the service directly (in-house) or to contract for its delivery by private actors (outsourcing), usually through some form of competitive tendering process (public procurement). We can understand this decision through the lens of discretion and agency. Many of these services are highly complex. They necessitate discretion in delivery that cannot be efficiently assumed centrally and is, then, necessarily delegated to agents. By selecting either a public or private delivery model, the state determines who should exercise that discretion and what form of governance regime to impose on them.

Policy design

The incorporation of sustainable corporate ownership into public procurement would require careful planning. The state would have to provide contracting authorities with a clear understanding of its expectations under a new policy, noting especially what is, and is not, expected and possible for contracting authorities to do under the current public procurement legal framework. This policy would also have to be reflected in adjustments to various contracting guidance documents, including the national procurement policy statement, to support these strategic changes. We can expect some of these changes to be relatively uncomplicated. They would effectively refocus the regime on criteria that reflect governance in sustainable corporate ownership, enabling and encouraging contracting authorities to include these criteria in their public procurement as part of their tender evaluation procedure and/or as a condition to tender (reserved procedure), as long as to do so can be considered to align with the overarching delivery of value for money. In doing so, the state would give contracting authorities the option to specify that private firms contracted to deliver public services demonstrate corporate governance reflecting elements of sustainable ownership and, under certain circumstances, give preference to those that do. In practice, it would be necessary to ask suppliers, when they submit a tender or pre-tender questionnaire, to include their constitutional documentation (in the case of a company, their articles of association) and any other relevant company documentation (for example, shareholder agreements) as evidence of any elements of sustainable ownership design which are incorporated there, including in relation to criteria of corporate purpose (beneficiary rights), decision-making power (control rights) and profit distribution (economic rights).

We can assume that aspects of this transitioning process are relatively low-cost. The state would change its tendering strategy, and while this might require some policy or even legal changes, further demands on resources would be limited, broadly speaking, to providing education and information regarding the new regime. Once a commitment to a new policy has been made, it would be relatively easy to implement in practice initially. The greater challenge would be to ensure the benefits of such a policy are fully realized in the medium term and long term.

Reversing financialization

The state may seek to reverse financialization in the corporate economy by awarding more public contracts to private providers in sustainable ownership. In this way, it may address an important secondary purpose of nurturing a less financialized corporate governance model and more sustainable design of corporate ownership in the wider economy while, at the same time, improving the outsourcing of public services – aspiring to create win-win. Initially at least, providers in sustainable ownership may rely on the largesse of the state by receiving payment for public service delivery as a form of nurturing, so that by delivering public contracts, they expand their capacity to operate as economically independent firms. This may, in the case of small firms or startups, act as a form of incubation to help them grow initial capacity to become established and eventually able to deliver not just more public contracts but also private contracts. In the case of larger and already established firms in sustainable ownership, it may nurture their continued capitalization and growth. We see the potential for a positive feedback loop between improving public service outsourcing and diversifying the wider economy by introducing more sustainable corporate ownership designs. The government's current procurement policies addressing VCSE organizations and SMEs already recognize some of these win-win opportunities (see Chapter One), highlighting that governance in these organizations can help deliver ‘smarter, more thoughtful and effective public services [while also rendering] the economy more innovative, resilient and productive’. A reframing of the existing policies could further strengthen and expand this by encouraging contracting authorities to favour a wider range of sustainable corporate forms (see Chapter Five) to deliver a wider range of public services.

Financialized corporate governance creates problems in the wider economy and for society that reach far beyond the delivery of public services. Unlike in past economic crises, the economic issue since the global financial crisis in 2008 is less about mass unemployment and more to do with the fact that many in employment remain poor, their wages stagnating as those who own capital extract an increasing share of the economy.

Contracts

The state may reduce problems in public service outsourcing by designing governance solutions that impact directly on the public outsourcing relationship with a view to reducing exploitative and extractive behaviour. A starting point in developing these solutions is, once again, the public outsourcing contract, which offers the state direct (private) governance leverage over its private provider. To ensure that outsourcing delivers both primary and secondary objectives (see Chapter One), contracting authorities will want to optimize the effectiveness of the public contract as a governance tool. By ensuring that public contracts are drafted appropriately, the state can minimize the risk of exploitation, formalization and even unwanted dependencies. In practice, however, the decision of how to approach the drafting and management of public outsourcing contracts always involves a balancing of different factors, including complexity and resource intensity, intended and unintended effects, and choice between long-term and short-term perspectives. In particular, the state has a balance to strike between, broadly speaking, a relatively formal and detailed contract design and one that allows for greater flexibility and adjustment.

The state may try to anticipate and avoid conflict and exploitation of incomplete outsourcing contracts by introducing more detailed contractual provisions. It can introduce more detailed metrics and targets against which performance and outputs will be measured and assessed – for example, by strengthening the use of KPIs to measure performance, to make it both more difficult for providers to avoid obligations under the contract and easier for the public authority to hold providers to account during or at the end of the delivery. For large public contracts, the new public procurement legislation reinforces this by requiring contracting authorities, where possible, to set and publish at least three KPIs. It runs a risk, however, that by designing overly complex contracts, the state expends public resources disproportionately without necessarily improving underlying issues related to, for example, power imbalances that can impact negatively on public contracting. The very conditions (for example, risk assurances, accounting requirements, clawback clauses) that are intended to hold providers to account and avoid exploitation can be those that are easier to address and absorb by larger and incumbent providers than smaller organizations and new entrants, thus undermining attempts at diversifying public service provision.

As the new UK procurement law comes into operation, addressing public outsourcing problems remains a difficult and gradual process where, despite their versatility, traditional governance tools in contract design, public markets and regulation all have demonstrable imperfections. Reintroducing public ownership, replacing contractual governance with a public governance regime, is an important alternative intervention, but it bears uncertainties as to whether, in the long term, the state can effectively provide ambitious public welfare without entering into extensive strategic partnerships with private actors. Far from shrinking its responsibilities, the state often uses private actors to achieve, through outsourcing, ambitions that demand additional capacity and capabilities. This is a perfect example of the interdependence of and synergies between market and state in delivering a common good.

Trying to identify alternative governance solutions, this book asks whether innovation is possible by expanding an already existing, but currently rather limited and confined, policy to co-opt corporate governance in sustainably owned firms into the contractual governance of public outsourcing instruments in order to reduce (though not fully avoid) the risk of exploitative and extractive behaviour by private partners. An extended policy, expanding the government's current initiatives to support VCSE organizations, would more fully accommodate the flexibilities available in corporate law to design supplementary governance solutions to common problems in public service outsourcing: it would encourage, even expect, contracting authorities to consider, in their outsourcing decisions, the sustainable corporate ownership design of their suppliers, with the aim of improving outsourcing while nurturing more sustainable corporate market actors.

Corporate organizations in sustainable ownership cover a spectrum of governance options, all of which temper financialization and avoid purely extractive design. These organizations are more diverse than those operating as VCSE organizations in the social economy; they include purposedriven profit-distributing firms, stakeholder-controlled companies, foundation ownership and mutually owned firms. UK company law leaves room for individual companies to reconfigure beneficiary rights, control rights and economic rights in the corporate organization ‘away’ from the investorcentric default model and towards economic, environmental and social sustainability objectives. To what extent corporate organizations make sensible use of this flexibility is a matter of some complexity, but it seems crucially important for government to assume a role through its public procurement in nurturing this experimentation in sustainable corporate ownership designs, enabling new forms to establish themselves and grow, including in the social and wider economy.

A new UK public procurement law

In 2023, the UK Parliament agreed on new public procurement legislation, moving beyond the previous public procurement regime based on European Union (EU) law. Public procurement legislation imposes on the public sector, and bodies with designated public responsibility, obligations to observe structured tender procedures when they contract out public services, especially those above a certain value threshold. It also provides remedies for aggrieved providers that lose out as a consequence of illegal contract awards. These public procurement rules have a variety of objectives, but mostly their aim is to ensure open and transparent tender procedures to maximize the benefit of market competition for the state when it buys goods or services from private suppliers. Where procedures lack transparency or are otherwise uncompetitive, this may restrict the state's choices and lead to suboptimal provider selection, meaning the public sector may not secure value for money, and therefore maximize public benefit, in its procurement.

The new UK public procurement law is one of the first major pieces of legislation to make use of greater freedom following Brexit, with the UK no longer being bound by EU law. The government presented the law as a chance mainly to simplify public procurement, to improve transparency and reduce bureaucracy, to adapt the regime to the UK's current procurement needs and to secure better access, especially for small and local providers, to public markets. The law repeals the existing regulations based on EU law and in their stead sets out new rules and procedures for public contracting authorities (including central government departments, their arm’s-length bodies and the wider public sector) in the selection of providers for the award of public contracts with a value above the relevant thresholds. It also includes provisions for contracts that fall below those thresholds.

Public procurement law is a complex and technical area of regulation, hardly a popular talking point. Yet in the debates over this new legislation, strong political sentiments and a profound unease with the way in which public contracting has developed in the UK in recent years, in ways that undermine attempts at delivering public value, quickly became apparent. UK government spending on public procurement has risen sharply in recent decades, and it currently accounts for roughly one third of all public spending in the UK.