What Does a Liberatory Workplace Look Like Anyway?
Staff experiencing joy. (Photo Creds: Makala Lee Photography)
From a young age, many of us are taught that if we work hard enough, we can create the life we want to live. What that life looks like may differ depending on our upbringing and the opportunities available to us but, somewhere along the way, work can become less about supporting the lives we want and more about simply keeping up.
Long workdays. Inadequate pay. Full calendars. Competing responsibilities. And between all of that, we are expected to find enough time and energy for the experiences and communities that make our lives meaningful. What if our work could be a space that also fills our cup?
Centering a ‘liberatory workplace’ is believing every space we’re in is part of creating more just communities. For those of us working in service sectors and community based organizations, that means looking not only at what we are working toward, but how we work toward it.
We have to ask ourselves: Are we creating workplaces where people have the space and capacity to show up fully and to create workplaces where we create within our organizations what we wish to create in the world?
Burnout should not be the price we pay for doing work we care about. Our commitment to justice should extend to the people working beside us every day.
What is a liberatory workplace?
A liberatory workplace is one that intentionally creates the conditions for people to work in ways that cultivate their sense of joy, purpose, and belonging.
It recognizes that employees are whole people, not simply workers or producers. Our ability to rest, care for ourselves and our families, experience joy, pursue interests outside of work, and feel financially secure matters.
Liberation in the workplace is not just about how we make people feel. It is reflected in the policies and practices that shape their everyday experience in both the workplace and the world.
That can look like paying livable wages so employees are not expected to sacrifice financial stability for mission-driven work. It can mean experimenting with a four-day work week or flexible schedules that recognize productivity does not have to be measured by how many hours someone sits at a desk.
It might look like providing wellness stipends employees can use for therapy, yoga, gym memberships, massages, creative practices, or whatever supports their wellbeing. It can mean offering generous paid time off and encouraging people to actually use it rather than creating a culture where rest comes with guilt.
It can look like trusting employees to manage their time, making workloads sustainable, creating opportunities for staff to influence decisions that affect them, investing in professional development, acknowledging contributions, making space for mistakes and learning, and ensuring people can ask for support without being perceived as incapable.
These practices communicate something important: you matter beyond what you produce here.
And that feeling, knowing that the organization you give your time and labor to is also invested in caring for you, can itself be liberatory.
What does a “full cup” have to do with liberation?
A full cup can look like having the capacity to create, imagine, and problem solve rather than simply having enough energy to finish the workday.
It can mean having time to care for yourself and the people you love. It can mean feeling trusted by your team, valued for what you uniquely bring and supported when you need rest.
When our workplaces make room for our humanity, we have more capacity to bring our gifts into the world.
Wellbeing is not separate from liberation; it is part of it.
Liberatory workplaces intentionally move away from workplace norms that prioritize urgency and productivity at the expense of people. In their place, we can build cultures centered on appreciation, wellbeing, shared power and the belief that people are more than what they produce.
Even organizations committed to justice can unintentionally reproduce the very systems we are working to dismantle. Tema Okun’s White Supremacy Culture framework names characteristics that can become normalized within organizations, including urgency, perfectionism, individualism, power hoarding, quantity over quality, and the belief that there is one “right” way to work.
Liberatory workplaces ask us to notice these patterns and intentionally practice something different. Here are some questions you may ask along the way:
What if urgency were replaced with spaciousness?
What if mistakes became opportunities for learning rather than evidence of failure?
What if success included whether employees could afford to live, rest and enjoy their lives?
What if the wellbeing of our people mattered just as much as what we produced?
Practicing liberation inside our organizations
We created our Liberatory Workplaces trainings to invite leaders to examine how white supremacy culture can show up in workplace norms and explore the antidotes we can practice in its place.
If you lead a team of any size, the course offers an opportunity to strengthen your ability to recognize oppressive workplace practices and co-create something different.
Because creating a liberatory workplace does not mean the work disappears. Deadlines will still exist. Difficult decisions will still need to be made. Organizations will still have goals to meet and communities to serve.
Liberation asks us to reconsider our relationship to the work and to one another while doing it.
If we want to create a more liberated world outside of our organizations, we also have to ask what liberation looks like inside of them.
No single benefit or policy automatically makes a workplace liberatory. It is the deeper commitment behind these practices: creating an environment where people have greater agency and capacity to live full lives.
The communities we serve deserve people who have the capacity to imagine something better. Our teams deserve workplaces where their humanity is valued. And each of us deserves a life where our cups do not have to remain empty in service of the mission.
Perhaps one of the most liberatory things we can do is create workplaces that don't just ask what people can give to the work, but also ask:
How might our workplaces be a reflection of the world we envision and are working to create?