Top 3 Ways to Support a Healthy Organizational Culture at Your Sober Living Home

Though they are places of residence first a foremost, sober living homes are also organizations, workplaces and therapeutic environments. As with any organization, sober living homes can easily breed toxic cultures where indirect communication, fear, intimidation, coercion, blame and high drama thrive. 

It is often said that when you fail to consciously plan and attend to your organizational culture, you invite bad actors to prioritize personal power over organizational values. This erosion can happen slowly over time and it can be a difficult problem to fix once it’s taken root. 

The solution? 

Proactively plan for a healthy organizational culture before a toxic environment can ever develop.

Today at the Sober Living App blog, we’ll look at 5 things all sober living home operators can do to proactively support a healthy organizational culture at their sober living homes.  

Healthy Organizational Culture Tip #1: Post the Philosophy and Rules of Your Sober Living Home in a Prominent Place 

Because addiction cannot peacefully co-exist with healthy relationships, people in recovery often need coaching around how to create, maintain and respect healthy interpersonal boundaries. It takes time and practice to unlearn the toxic relationship patterns and behaviors that people with SUD practiced when they were using. 

One of the ways this manifests in sober living homes is a lot of boundary-testing around rules. Residents may break or bend rules to see how strictly and consistently they are enforced. Residents may attempt to “split” authority figures from one another to undermine a “united front” on rules. This, in turn, can result in a conflict between managers or other standard-bearing figures within your sober living home’s orbit. 

Don’t let this happen.

Clearly post the philosophy and house rules of your sober living home in a prominent place (like the living room) so that there is full transparency on what is and is not allowed. This consistency actually invites a sense of safety and stability into the sober living home environment and encourages a deepening of residents’ recovery.

Healthy Organizational Culture Tip #2: Don’t Hire Friends, Sponsors or Sponsees at your Sober Living Home 

This is very controversial in the addiction treatment and recovery communities, but we humbly suggest that you reconsider hiring friends, sponsors and sponsees to manage your sober living home. These types of arrangements are sometimes called “dual relationships” and they can quickly and easily lead to trouble. It is difficult to maintain the proper professionalism and objective distance that a healthy working relationship requires when you are also personally “friendly” with your employee, especially if that friendship pre-dates the working relationship. 

Not only are these relationships difficult to manage themselves, they can also wreak havoc on your other working relationships within the organization. It will be easy for others to view your relationship as “favoritism” and “bias” and this will haunt you in future conflicts outside of the immediate dual relationship, as well. 

Healthy Organizational Culture Tip #3: Model Healthy Conflict Resolution at Your Sober Living Home

People in recovery frequently struggle with healthy conflict resolution skills. Direct communication and assertiveness can feel threatening and foreign to those who are not accustomed to respecting and maintaining healthy boundaries. 

The fix?

Model healthy conflict resolution skills at your sober living home. Train all management and residents in healthy communication (like Non-Violent Communication or NVC) and create space for a formal conflict resolution process at your sober living home should anyone request it or require it. Put down in writing what a formal conflict resolution process entails and require all residents to agree to submit to such a process, if needed, in writing. There are many models of these types of processes online for free. Simply choose the one that most resonates with your sober living home’s mission and values and make sure to include those details in your new resident agreement. Make additional copies or a poster detailing the process accessible in a common area. 

We’re Here to Help Your Sober Living Home Create a Healthy Organizational Culture

At Sober Living App, we’re passionate about helping sober living homes across the country operate smarter. 

Running a sober living home can be a huge hassle, but it doesn’t have to be. 

We’ve distilled all the chaos that can easily overwhelm sober living home operators into a simple app that “thinks” about all the little details that go into running your sober living home 24/7 so you don’t have to. 

Claim your free, no-strings free trial today and see the Sober Living App difference for yourself.