How We Work Together

oikos International is a complex organization with all our initiatives and other fields of action that pop up over the year. While some things seem to happen out of an unplanned cross-pollination of ideas and the ambition of individuals, there is a certain underlying structure to our more frequent initiatives and workflows.

Roles

One important element that helps coordinating the work and keeping the overview within the international team are roles: a granular set of responsibilities that belong to each other and that have been taken over by an individual, in agreement with the according sub-team. Roles help us as well to identify potential gaps and lacking capacity in the team, and they help us navigate the impact of our work. Moreover, the choice to use roles has been consciously made to have a clearer distinction between the responsibilities a person has at oikos and the individual behind it. A person can have several roles, which are summarized in each individual’s role wardrobe. Learn more about roles in the role field guide.

On top of being either volunteers or employees, some members of the oikos international Team are elected by our community, which gives them some specific roles:

The Board Member Role

Board membership can be seen as an elected role. Being a student-driven and student-led organization, the oikos board holds an important role in stewarding and role-modeling the values and ambitions of oikos. The main role of the elected board is to listen attentively - to what is going on in the community, in the world around us and in the team itself, and from there, to act and respond in their granular roles and functions in other circles. The board is elected every year and hosts 7 student volunteers and two co-presidents (elected & paid employees). Read more about the board, how it is elected and who might be a board member in the board field guide.

The Co-President Role

Also part of the board are two elected oikos International co-presidents with paid positions. The role of the oikos president is to steward the oikos community and the international team while sharing the student experience of the community with external partners. The co-presidency was first introduced in November 2021, with a 2 years-mandate for each president. This allows for a one year overlap between the two presidents’ terms, increasing the continuity while maintaining the dynamic and improving the efficiency of the handover from the outgoing to the newly elected presidents.

Why did we move from one President to a Co-Presidency?

Over the years, as the movement around sustainability gained in importance, the presidency has become a big responsibility with high workload & pressure. On the inside of oikos, decisions often have been handed over to the president, creating an unhealthy dependence and bottleneck between team, board and community. The question that popped up over the past years: Is our presidency-model still contemporary? How could we possibly move towards practicing the more participatory leadership we are preaching, and making sure that knowledge keeps evolving in the organization? How to address the roles of the president in a more spacious way, making more air for leadership, strategic guidance, operational support, partnerships and experience-sharing? Learn more about the transition and our reasoning here.

Decision-Making

Another critical element: our way of making decisions. Over the years, we discovered that this is a very difficult and fundamental topic for how we work together. At the core of our decision making is the assumption that people who own a role and who are directly affected by a decision should be involved in the decision. This happens through different forms of giving and asking for advice, depending on the scope of the decision. In general terms, we believe that every individual who follows through with an action has the agency to prepare and take an informed decision. On every level, we work with consent and critical objections to sharpen our decisions and stay in movement. Read more about our decision making in the decision making field guide.

oikos’ culture & identity in the workplace

oikos has a history of being forward-thinking and acting - not only in the outside world, but also on the inside for how we work as a team. oikos is a real lab, a practice place, a playground where everyone is invited to try out new things and grow into new roles. Making mistakes is an important opportunity to learn and we all appreciate feedback and are integrating it more consciously into our everyday work (learn more here in the feedback field guide).

Our international nature requires open-mindedness and attentive listening as a prerequisite to successful collaboration. We give our best to be clear about expectations and commitments. Next to this, sustainability is also a topic for how we work together: we care for our collective and individual wellbeing and make space to prioritize health. Another focus of our culture is the together: we value each other as human beings beyond our roles, which becomes visible in practices such as personal check-ins.