How to boost the impact of organizational interventions?

“Organizational interventions” could be defined as change initiatives that aim to improve individual, group and organizational outcomes by mitigating or preventing problems, or by promoting positive outcomes. Typically, these types of interventions intend to achieve their outcomes by changing the way work is organized, designed or managed (Nielsen, 2013).

Organizational interventions are strongly embedded in their context of application (Montano, et. al, 2014) and as such their success if often dependent on a substantial collaboration between consultants/researchers, the organization and its stakeholders (e.g., managers and employees) (Kristensen, 2005). This often means that a very successful and impactful organizational intervention in one organization, site or team is not often immediately generalized to other contexts.

Considering organizational and/or occupational health interventions there seems to be a persistent perception in the market that one program or initiative could be easily applied and successfully delivered to several organizations without taking into account strong and relevant interactions between the content of the intervention (e.g., What are the intervention activities or services provided?), process (e.g., Which existing structures can be used and which needs to be challenged, to facilitate implementation?) and context (e.g., Have new challenges emerged?) (Pettigrew & Whipp, 1993).

In their recent article, Schwarz et al. (2020) offer a set of core principles — the Sigtuna Principles, grounded in cross-field knowledge, that could guide researchers and practitioners on how to optimize the impact and sustainability of organizational interventions across the designing, implementation and evaluation phases.

Particularly, for practitioners the critical principles presented are:

1. Ensure active participation and engagement among key stakeholders.

Employees and organizations are not passive recipients of organizational interventions, and as such they need to shape, manage and own interventions. We already know that participatory approaches are currently recommend by national and international policy agencies for managing psychosocial risk and for organizational interventions (Nielsen, 2017).

1. Understand the situation (starting points and objectives).

Organizations are social systems, with their single dynamics and histories. Understanding the current momentum of an organization includes considering work systems, working conditions, history, challenges and problems, and also implicit and explicit goals and intended outcomes of the intervention (e.g., the ideal end state).

1. Align the intervention with existing organizational objectives.

Alignment helps create engagement by demonstrating how the intervention can contribute to important organizational outcomes and reduces the risk of unintended side effects that can emerge when an intervention is designed, implemented and evaluated without considering how it may affect other areas (e.g., when and intervention benefits one employee group at the expense of another). Finally, aligning objectives is essential to minimize the risk of the intervention becoming a time-limited ancillary project, discontinued once the change agents in the organization move on.

1. Explicate the program logic.

It is critical to outline the logical links between the intervention activities and immediate, short- and long-term outcomes, clearly focusing on the theory of change (i.e., the how and why intervention activities may work) adding to the theories of health (i.e., the relationship between to work factors and employee health) normally used when considering organizational and occupational health interventions.

1. Prioritize intervention activities based on effort-gain balance.

Decisions concerning which activities to prioritize should be based on an effort-gain balance analysis. Organizations should consider the anticipated impact of an intervention on the one hand and the expected effort needed to realize it on the other. The big advantage of this approach is that it helps prioritize some activities (low effort-high gain) over others (high effort — low gain).

1. Work with existing practices, processes and mindsets.

Any intervention should fit with organization logics and daily work and this way reduce the risk of conflict with existing organizational procedures, practices and mindsets and facilitate stakeholder engagement. One example of working with existing practices can be to use groups, meetings and communication pathways that are already in place rather creating new practices (Malchaire, 2004). It is important to acknowledge that sometimes is not always feasible, for instances when the existing processes are part of the problem.

1. Iteratively observe, reflect and adapt.

Organizations need to iteratively observe, reflect, and make adaptations to the planned intervention, implementation or context as the intervention unfolds. To be able to do this it is critical to establish ongoing monitoring and evaluation of the intervention progress and intentionally use this information to improve the intervention roll-out to ensure goal attainment. Data and analysis are key to ensuring rigour and iterative cycles in this systematic and dynamic approach to change.

1. Develop organizational learning capabilities.

Building learning capabilities during an intervention ensures that lessons are collected within the organization to support future change efforts. This includes lessons from each step of the intervention process as well as tools, infrastructures and practices developed. Most often we see that organizational interventions tend to become finite projects which are not sustaining over time (which limits their impact on the medium to long-term) even though they are often very expensive in terms of efforts (e.g., time, money, emotional and cognitive efforts).

These principles clearly contribute to a better framework when designing, implementing and evaluating organizational interventions and offer practitioners a constructive and transformative approach to increase the impact of all organizational interventions, quite relevant and urgent when considering organizational health programs and initiatives.

References

Kristensen, T. (2005). Intervention studies in occupational epidemiology. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 62(3), 205–210.

Malchaire, J. (2004). The SOBANE risk management strategy and the Déparis method for the participatory screening of the risks. International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health, 77(6), 443–450.

Montano, D., Hoven, H., & Siegrist, J. (2014). Effects of organisational-level interventions at work on employees’ health: A systematic review. BMC Public Health, 14(1), 135

Nielsen, K. (2013). Review article: How can we make organizational interventions work? Employees and line managers as actively crafting interventions. Human Relations, 66(8), 1029–1050.

Nielsen, K., & Miraglia, M. (2017). What works for whom in which circumstances? On the need to move beyond the ‘what works?’ question in organizational intervention research. Human Relations, 70(1), 40–62.

Pettigrew, A., & Whipp, R. (1993). Managing change for competitive success. Wiley-Blackwell.

Schwarz, V. T., Nielsen, K., Edwards, K., Hasson, H., Ipsen, C., Savage, C., Abildgaard, J. S., Richter, A., Lornudd, C., Mazzocato, P. & Reed, J. (2020): How to design, implement and evaluate organizational interventions for maximum impact the Sigtuna Principles, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology.

This post was originally published at www.boundmakers.wordpress.com