The Power of Participatory Planning

Highlighting the SOBANE Approach (shout-out Terri Szymanski) and the Healthy Workplace Participatory Program (HWPP)

Benjamin Franklin said,

“Tell me, and I will forget; Teach me, and I’ll remember; Involve me, and I will learn.”

Analysis from McKinsey & Company found 39% of failures for organizational change efforts can be traced to employee resistance to change.

In addition, the Global Wellness Report (2016) taught us more than half of respective respondents (56%) said their employer-offered well-being programs were irrelevant.

Even the annual Sanofi Canada Healthcare Survey for 2019 stated how only 49% of plan members had awareness of changes made to their benefit plan in the past two years.

What this wisdom and findings represent is a gap, and thus an opportunity. When planning something for, or giving something to employees, change in general, specific best practices can be leveraged. The purpose of this article is to highlight the best practice of incorporating employee feedback during a planning process, classified as participatory planning.

As a few high level thoughts, the best plans are co-created. To create lasting change in the organization, the organization must be brought along the journey. Like a cruise ship, organizations don’t turn on a dime. If it takes a village to raise an individual child, it takes the collective of an organization to execute a successful transformation, and obtain the effects of organizational health — being adaptable, agile, and innovative.

Co-creating applies the principle of the whole as greater than the sum of the parts, with the whole representative of the collaboration/partnerships with front-line employees and leadership. What co-creating achieves is the involvement of front-line employees. The notion of ‘ask the employees’, so that an organization is planning, giving, or making change through them, not to them. Doing so ensures the structure is driven by the periphery, the [front-line] teams that touch the market, rather than the[leadership] teams at the centre. Sound organizational strategy depends on an organizations ability to perceive what’s really going on — embracing reality. This achieves doing change for the employee, not to the employee. As the Healthy Work Campaign, mentions, through participatory approach, involving workers, labor and management working together to create workplace change is best.

An experiment from Daniel Kahneman about lottery tickets, with a twist, reflects the importance of asking and involving employees. In his experiment, researchers had half of the participants randomly assigned a numbered lottery ticket, and the remaining half given a blank ticket and asked to choose their own lottery numbers. Then, just before drawing the winning number, the researchers offered to buy back all the tickets. The researchers wanted to find out how much they would have to pay participants who wrote their own number compared with participants who were handed a numbered lottery ticket. The rational expectation would be that there should be no difference since a lottery is pure chance. And even, you should have to pay the people who wrote their own number ever so slightly less, because of the possibility that there will now be duplicate numbers that, if chosen, would mean the size of the price would be cut in half. What happened? People who wrote their own number always demanded at least five times more for their ticket.

This finding represents how when we are personally involved in authoring an outcome, we are far more committed to it because we feel we own it. The underlying psychology relates to our need for control, which is deep-rooted survival instinct. Therefore, when planning initiatives, they are best done by those who will ultimately be responsible for executing against the plan, ie. the employees. Doing so builds ownership in the spirit of the ‘write your own lottery ticket’.

However, the legacy perspective of demand and control often makes the employees involvement invisible. Legacy perspectives include a predetermined objective method, without dealing with the reality of the concerns in the particular context. In doing so, such methods exclude participation of everyone, especially front-line employees, except external experts. There are significant concerns about the reliability and validity of such methods as these methods tend to overlook worker [front-line employees] concerns. Therefore, leading to changes not being fully communicated and committed to by employees, and potentially cost-effective changes that are ignored. Aaron Dignan writes, every time you give an order or an answer, you’re either wrong or preventing employees from discovering something better, or you’re right and preventing employees from learning. Albeit the catch in this is the wisdom for employees to know the difference between the reversible and the irreversible.

There is time and place for expert recommendations, but such can come along with involving and asking employees. Expert recommendations are necessary, but not sufficient. When leadership is able let go of their desire to shape everything and everyone, and instead sense what is happening and what could happen, they are able to see solutions, often in ways they can’t anticipate.

In Health and Safety Management Systems, success arises from front-line employee involvement. This creates ownership and buy-in to the system and/or change, crucial for sustaining engagement. What this involvement looks like is participation in risk assessment, inspection, preventative maintenance, training, emergency response, and incident reporting (Health and Safety Executive). Similarly, in project design work, when teams have the right and the inclination to experiment with their own rules and norms, really involving themselves in solutions, they can find ways to collaboratively leverage and preserve resources. The tragedy of the commons is that we think we can’t share (Brave New Work).

The practical knowledge of front-line employees is needed to develop workable preventive measures as they know the problems and the details of what really happens when they perform their tasks or activities. Doing so, engaging employees in the design of interventions for solutions, informs firsthand about information and obstacles to their own and colleagues’ health and well-being, resulting in a sense of coherence and individual self-efficacy towards change. Thus, health improvement through employee control can lead to the following benefits:

- Boosting employee engagement in initiatives
- Providing integrative solutions
- Supporting continuous improvement
- Improving employee satisfaction and organizational health climate

As such, organizations may immediately think the solution is more (additional employees, another meeting, a new policy, new decision tools, etc.). However, an equally important question that front-line employees can contribute to, “What can we remove, take away, or stop doing?”

All in all, to emphasize, in general, research from McKinsey and Company tells us that allowing staff to contribute to the planning of the initiatives they will be involved in is 3.4 times more likely to be considered successful.

The following two tools will now be featured in this article to satisfy the ‘how to’ of participatory planning, in the context of healthy work.

The SOBANE approach as an example of an approach which leverages participatory planning. The SOBANE approach for the risk prevention aspect of healthy work includes 4 levels: Screening, Observation, Analyze, and Expertise. As the levels progress, putting initial efforts to Screening and then progressing to the other levels, knowledge of the work situation is contrasted to subject-matter expertise in healthy work. It is employee participation (participatory planning) which is the principle means of risk assessment in the Screening and Observation levels. The levels can be further described by:

Screening — where the risk factors are detected by the workers and their management, and obvious solutions are implemented.
Observation — where the remaining problems are studied in more detail, one by one, and the reasons and the solutions are discussed in detail.
Analysis — where, when necessary, an OH practitioner is called upon to carry out appropriate measurements to develop specific solutions.
Expertise — where, in very sophisticated and rare cases, the assistance of an expert is called upon to solve a particular problem.
(J. Malchaire, A. Piette, W. D’Horre, S. Stordear, 2008)

The second tool to share in this article is the Healthy Workplace Participatory Program (HWPP), by The Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace (CPH-NEW). The CPH-NEW is one of six Center’s for Excellence for moving the Total Worker Health (TWH) approach forward, funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

The purpose of the HWPP is participatory planning, through engaging employees in designing solutions for healthy work. This includes the work environment, work organization, safety, and employee well-being. How the HWPP specifically approaches participatory planning is by using a two/duel-committee structure, a Steering Committee and a Design Team. The Steering Committee and the Design Team engage and collaborate together for the purposes of striving to improve health, safety and well-being for all employees.

The Steering Committee consists of employees from the management level, while the Design Team consists of front-line employees. It is the Steering Committee who provides oversight and resources, and the Design Team who develops interventions; interventions as in solutions to specific health, safety, and well-being issues, through identifying employee concerns, developing and proposing changes, and advocating for these changes to improve the work environment.

During each meeting, it is the Design Team who uses the 7-Step “IDEAS” tool (Intervention Design and Analysis Scorecard) to develop a business case for solutions to present to the Steering Committee of organizational leaders, considering costs, benefits, barriers, and opportunities for each proposed solution. Note that in addition to input from the Design Team who consists of front-line employees, the Design Team still speaks with co-workers between meetings to gather their input as well. By forming solutions through the systematic process of the IDEAS tool, the Design Team couples each solution with relevant details for objectives, evaluation criteria, specific activities, and resource considerations. The 7-steps of the IDEAS tool are:

Step 1: Identify Problems & Contributing Factors
Step 2: Develop Objectives & Activities
Step 3: Set Selection Criteria
Step 4: Apply Selection Criteria
Step 5: Rate & Select Intervention Alternatives
Step 6: Plan & Implement Interventions
Step 7: Monitor & Evaluate Interventions

The Design Team takes the lead with Steps 1–5a, with Steering Committee input, to identify root causes behind health concerns, and design solutions that directly address root causes, and present interventions to the Steering Committee. Conversely, the Steering Committee takes the lead with Steps 5b-7, with Design Team input, to evaluate the Design Team’s proposed interventions, decide which to find, then support and oversee implementation and evaluation.

The following document under the ‘Fillable Worksheet Series’ hyperlink of the following website offers a template for adding content to each step of the IDEAS tool. https://www.uml.edu/Research/CPH-NEW/Healthy-Work-Participatory-Program/generate-solutions/

Here is a screenshot of the first page (Step 1):

That said, by the HWPP using participatory planning through the IDEAS tool, the organization is able to identify root causes and barriers, spark grassroots solutions that are integrated (combine safety and well-being) resulting in engaged front-line employees, and an overall organized communication workflow between management and front-line employees.

Participatory planning can make risk prevention faster, more cost-friendly, and more effective, by including contributions from workers themselves, such as those on the front-line. What this comes down to is sustaining engagement through shared decision-making. Organizations don’t change, people so. Participatory planning ensures the right knowledge comes to the surface so that plans are as robust as possible. There is great power in the words “I commit” when employees feel like we they are involved, and thus valued or appreciated.

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Nathan Kolar, www.reachworldwide.ca