Social Impact Tech: Nat Whalley of Organise On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact
Organise is the worker-led network for fixing employment. It is the catalyst for collective action at work — creating a more effective way to unify, energise and mobilise working people around the workplace and employment problems that affect them. We bring together like-minded workers in a safe and positive digital environment where they can share their concerns about the issues they’re facing at work.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course, many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Nat Whalley.
Nat Whalley is CEO and co-founder of Organise, the worker-led network for fixing employment. Nat founded Organise with a singular goal in mind: to provide the tools, network and confidence to empower workers to get heard at work.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
I grew up with my parents and my little sister in Essex, UK. From a young age, I played a lot of football (soccer) but when I got to secondary school (high school), girls weren’t allowed to play football which at that time I found very unfair. Unbeknownst to me, I started my very first anonymous campaign — an online petition at the age of 13, using Hotmail to gather lots of signatures that I then sent to the school. After that, girls were allowed to play and ironically, during my first mixed-sex game I ended up breaking my finger- but even then I knew it was worth it!
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
I entered the workforce in my 20s and I think it’s safe to say that I was a bit naïve. I saw everyday micro-aggressions occur and experienced the now (sadly) typical, workplace issues such as, men getting rapidly promoted or, individuals sexually harassing colleagues without consequences. I remember going to meet with a union rep at the time and the advice I was given was, “that’s just how it is” it made me feel like there was no hope and all my hard work was for nothing. I decided enough was enough and I wanted to out, so that I was able to help others. I spent a long time waiting for someone else to step in and change the status quo, but then I got impatient and decided to make a change.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
In 2012 I landed my first job and I got the opportunity to work with the late Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit. The project we worked together on was based on creating a new form of media. Imagine if newspapers were connected to collective action- essentially, we created a platform to read news but take action on it as well. The project ended up folding but during that time we worked together I saw him challenge our assumptions and he changed my way of thinking asking questions like, “why do we chase clicks?” and that’s one of the things that I have carried through when building Organise as a business. Our business model needs to be tied to our impact, which is why it is driven by worker subscriptions because then you build a site that’s powered by workers and it is the workers that are paying for it. How your business model is defined is how you will define the product and the value you will build for users.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
To quote Dory from Finding Nemo — “Just keep swimming.” I think this a lesson for all entrepreneurs, you’ll make mistakes along the way and people will doubt you but honestly just keep pressing forwards and you’ll get there.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
The things that make me successful are the things that make our users successful, which are:
- Being impatient — is an important character for a business leader, because you’re looking to do things more efficiently and streamlined. That’s one of the reasons why I started Organise. I got tired of waiting for someone else to create something like Organise because I really wanted to use it. So by getting impatient you can achieve great things that others can benefit from, you can see that from the people who use the platform. They are petitioning to get either their bosses, unions or governments to listen to them because they are tired of waiting for someone else to do it. Waiting doesn’t work, they need to take action.
- I’m optimistic– there is always hope in a situation no matter how dark it seems. Even if that’s through finding solidarity and sharing what you are going through on the platform through other users who are in the same situation as you. We’ve seen this firsthand where users are sharing their problems and then feel like there is hope because they had no idea that others felt the same way or might be going through the same thing.
- Just ask– being a business leader you get the best advisers or best investors by asking people, sometimes by just asking the right question you can open so many doors.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our society. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?
When workers are being unfairly treated, they really have limited options for support or, to take collective action.
As women in the working world, my co-founder (Bex) and I had experienced harassment in previous roles, and neither of had been able to do much about it. We knew that HR wasn’t really there to represent our interests, and we started to see that a huge number of workers were in a similar position — voiceless, isolated, and prone to exploitation because they have so little power. This platform that we have created shifts power back to workers, to give them a voice to let them know that they are not alone and — we made sure that users could keep their anonymity so they aren’t penalised at work.
How do you think your technology can address this?
Organise is the worker-led network for fixing employment. It is the catalyst for collective action at work — creating a more effective way to unify, energise and mobilise working people around the workplace and employment problems that affect them. We bring together like-minded workers in a safe and positive digital environment where they can share their concerns about the issues they’re facing at work.
We equip them with expertise, community-building, and campaigning tools that allow them to:
- Share the load — get help and support with work issues from a vast peer network.
- Clarify the issue — find out who else is feeling the same way, how far and wide the problem has spread, whether other workers or companies struggle with similar problems.
- Campaign without risk — canvas opinions, collate data and compile evidence, build campaigns, and show unity to management without the risk of personal reprisal.
- Take action and solve problems — rally workers into taking the action needed to fix their problems — from organising letter-writing campaigns and petitions to engaging the media.
By empowering workers, any working person can join the Organise network. Today, our a million-strong community unites frontline workers, desk-based professionals, and home-workers, those in the gig economy, and anyone who feels isolated and alone in their job.
The Organise network offers safety in numbers, allowing isolated workers to connect with people doing the same work or battling the same employment challenges. By unifying people around these shared issues, Organise provides a safe environment in which they can grow their confidence as campaigners and action-takers, gathering the knowledge, data, and context they need to take to their bosses — information that they can’t get anywhere else. It allows workers to make better-informed judgments about how to build effective campaigns, guided by Organise’s tech and supported by its team of campaigning experts.
Crucially, Organise does not represent workers. It empowers them. Because working people know their own situations, workplace challenges or office politics, better than anyone. We focus on providing the tools workers so desperately need to speak up and get heard — in the boardroom, by the media, within their industries.
Below are a few examples of where we have helped workers:
Amazon- workers across multiple markets used Organise to successfully lobby for a change in Amazon’s sustainability policies. Workers in the UK began to spot that perfectly usable items were routinely being sent to landfill or the incinerator. Unaware of the scale of the issue, they used Organise to gain feedback from Amazon workers in other markets and present this to Amazon’s leadership. When Amazon didn’t respond constructively, they used the findings they’d gathered to reach out to media — creating enough noise that Amazon opted to change policy in UK, Spain, France, and the US.
McDonalds– workers in the UK were able to achieve a £10 per hour minimum wage using Organise and workers were also able to commit management to the provision of better safety gloves and improved safety procedures for kitchen workers. A few months later, they used the Organise network to map employee reports of burns suffered in McDonald’s kitchens and win better gauntlets (gloves).
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
A friend of a friend had just been fired from their job when they told their employer they were pregnant which is obviously illegal. But the way they did it was through a loophole which meant that they were able get away with it. It struck a chord with me because it was something that happened to my mum 30 years ago. She was the first female engineer at her company and the company just didn’t know how to change the payroll or, set up maternity benefits so instead they fired her. I set up a Crowdfunder for this friend of a friend to take her company to court. We might not have won if we had got to court, but the growing attention that this petition and Crowdfunder got made the employer listen because even though through a technicality it wasn’t illegal it was immoral and they knew it. The publicity around the Crowdfunder got her, her job back and 6 months full pay maternity. If a company knows it’s doing something that isn’t right, exposing it by using the power of the crowd is what made me think that this needs to exist and it’s one of the founding principles of Organise.
How do you think this might change the world?
By connecting workers, we’re giving them power so that they can talk to each other and swap data. That knowledge is power, for example, if you are at the top of an organisation you can see these different data points and choose to do something about it. But if you are a worker who is sitting in an organisation that only has two or three people in it you can feel really isolated- by connecting them through our technology, all of a sudden they are connected to lots of people in similar situations, where they can share stories and aggregate situations and identify that there are loads of them going through the same thing. This gives them the confidence to speak out and get heard. When you have lots of empowered workers who are taking action to improve their situations it will have a huge impact on not only their material situation but also their mental health. This platform shifts power back to workers. It’s already helping over 1 million people in the UK and we’re just getting started in the USA.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
One of the big risks is replicating the problems of other social media platforms, so platforms like Twitter where users can say whatever they with impunity, Organise is intentionally not a platform for free speech. It has values and principles which guide our community and you cannot say anything that harms users or workers. We have to think about what is the moderation of this technology and how do we build our algorithms that doesn’t bias towards things that has a higher click rate because they are more divisive. An example of this could be a few years ago, we had a user called Claudia who claimed to be London’s first female Uber driver- she ran a campaign to request a button on Uber for passengers to be able to request female drivers. This was something that didn’t go down well with male Uber drivers but this sparked a conversation online which led to Uber introducing the button (on Uber Lux), to request the same driver again regardless of sex. It was because we were able to connect people through our platform who disagreed with her that we were able to help her bring this to her employer and get a resolution that worked for all.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)
- What are the barriers to someone taking action — you are looking for the most marginalised here. When you fix something for someone who might be a small use case it might make a big impact for everyone making it easier. We had a blind user who helped us find a better framework to build our technology in that works better with a screen reader. The side benefit is that this also works better for SEO. When you design for the most marginalised you often get a better system.
- Technology that allows people to build their confidence — seeing like-minded people that are taking action alongside them is important as, it makes them feel a part of a community and it gives them praise. Just because we see people doing this every day, this can be a life-changing moment for someone who has been struggling with an issue for decades. We had someone who saw an organiser running an open letter to change their holiday allocations, inspired by seeing someone else take action on the issue they’d struggled with for years. They started their own petition to make it easier for parents of school-age kids to book school holidays off.
- Keep it simple– remove assumptions and find out what the core things are for you need to get good results. The fundamentals of power inside a workplace are the same in every context.
- Acknowledging that your technology exists as part of a community– for example, you might be part of the Organise community but they might also be a part of a church or a union and these things should work together. We see more of our organisers win when they integrate their Organise campaign with wider communities.
- Making it as shareable as possible- so more people can get involved to drive change. We design our actions to be as frictionless as possible, so that our members can get on with taking as much collective action as possible!
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
It feels amazing! Our organisers who create actions on our site get to feel like this every day and the positive impact is phenomenal especially for their mental health.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Alexis Ohanian- Co-founder of Reddit, because he has created a technology that has hundreds of self-organizing communities and I think the principles of that have a lot of overlap with what we are doing at Organise. I’d love to talk about how we build in the confidence piece and the tools of Organise in a self-organising way.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Twitter: @Organisehq
LinkedIn: Organise
Facebook: Organise
Instagram: Organisehq
Website: https://www.organise.network/
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
Social Impact Tech: Nat Whalley of Organise On How Their Technology Will Make An Important… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.