Strategic Planning

Before you begin, you will want to ensure that you have the proper support and mandate from your union structures and leadership to engage in a strategic planning process.

A core representative committee can help plan what the strategic planning process will focus on, prepare research and materials, decide on workshop dates and locations and recruit participants. The core committee will need to be accountable to and report to the leadership structures of the union.

The core committee is important and should be made up of a vertical slice of the union, with participants who are workers, delegates, staff and elected leaders. The involvement of top decision-makers will help ensure that the strategic plan is in keeping with the overall union goals. The committee needs to be representative of the various types of work, gender, language and other groupings within the union. We want to ensure maximum participation from all levels and parts of the union from the beginning.

The core group will need to be in communication with workers. This can be organised through the “arbolitos” or delegate networks or other union structures. Having each core committee member in regular contact with a specific group of workers will help you with recruitment for the strategic planning workshops, communications about the strategic planning process as it moves forward, and the implementation of the action plans.

You may want to have a number of separate strategic planning workshops, particularly if your union covers a large geographic area or your union represents a large number of workers. Representatives from each of the workshops can gather together to coordinate and merge the results and then take the coordinated overall plan back to their respective groups and to the union governing bodies for approval.

You may want to limit the number of workshop participants to protect the opportunities for all participants to speak and be heard, or you may want to hold large workshops to help build consensus (with lots of small work groups).

At the beginning of the workshop, create a list titled “Additional Information and Action Needed” on a flipchart or shared document. Come back to the items on this list at the appropriate times, particularly during the discussions on calendaring and commitments.

Before or during the strategic planning workshops, plan to analyse the union’s Power Resources, complete a SWOT Analysis or engage in Participatory Action Research. This will help you to have a collectively shared appreciation of where the union stands.   

If you complete the analysis before the workshop, the results can be shared and discussed during the workshop.

The core committee will need to gather information and research prior to the workshops. The more you know and share about the issues your union is facing, the better the strategic plan will be.

You can create specific reports designed to provide background information and move the planning process forward. The reports can be written or verbal or some combination of both. They can be given to participants before or during the strategic planning workshops. Resource people can also be brought into the workshops to give information or presentations on specific topics.

If individual one-on-one surveys and interviews of particular groups of workers will help ground the strategic planning process, work with the Participatory Action Research materials prior to holding the workshops. For example, you might want to interview a number of informal workers, women or workplace delegates prior to the workshop.

You might include some of the following in your background reports:

Take time during the workshop to update your current mission statement or develop one. The mission statement describes why the union exists, who it serves and the values it stands for. The mission statement is best created during the strategic planning workshop to ensure best results and collective ownership.

The following is an example of a union mission statement: “The mission of the Antigua and Barbuda Workers Union is to promote and protect the social and economic well-being of workers by defending their rights and interests.” You can also create a mission statement that includes an emphasis on a particular issue such as climate change or gender equity.

Use the visualisation method to gather, cluster and post participants ideas. For more information on the visualisation method, go to the materials on “Committees”

If there is not enough time, or the group is too large to complete a final draft of the mission statement, appoint a small subcommittee to complete the task.

The next step will be to brainstorm, discuss and prioritise the problems for the subject area that the strategic planning workshop will be focused on. 

You will most likely need to limit the number of problems or subject areas you are focusing on to one area at a time. We can’t solve all of our problems at once. 

Plan to repeat the strategic planning process for other problems or subject areas once you have shown success in one prioritised area.

Once you have defined and prioritised the problems, the next step is to imagine how the union could resolve the problem or improve the situation.

Take a few moments for everyone to think quietly. Call out ideas or go around the room. 

Don’t reject ideas or stifle creative thinking and enthusiasm. The ideas might not make sense right now, but could in the future.

Use the Visualisation Method to gather, cluster and sort ideas.

There is no need to evaluate or rank the ideas generated. The brainstormed ideas we have imagined will lay the groundwork from which we develop more practical steps.

Taking one prioritised problem at a time, rephrase the problem as a positive statement or goal. 

Each problem, when restated in a positive way, becomes a goal. From each goal, we can create a number of specific objectives. Goals are the outcome we intend to achieve. They give us direction to our efforts. Objectives are the more detailed, specific steps or building blocks that help us achieve our goals.

Depending on the number of goals and objectives and the resources of the union, you may want to prioritise the 1-3 most important objectives for each goal.

If you have too many goals or objectives, work together to further prioritise them.

Our next step is to set benchmarks and dates for completion. For each objective, set a specific number or measurable action items and a rough date of when the benchmark will be completed. 

It is very important for the benchmarks to be both low enough to be realistic and high enough to make a difference.   

For example,

• By November of this year, we will recruit, train and assign 10 mentors to 10 workplace delegates by November of this year. 
• By November of this year, we will interview a minimum of 30 workplace delegates to create a list of workshop topics for delegate trainings.
• By the end of January of next year, we will hold the first of the 12 monthly delegate workshops.

Keep adding to your calendar and task list until you have completed your plan. 

If useful, ask participants to identify 1 to 3 obstacles that might prevent the plan from being implemented. Split up into small groups with one obstacle assigned to each small group and identify three realistic things that could be done to overcome that obstacle. Share the results and revise the plan as needed.

Before you have completed the strategic planning workshop you will need to plan how you will follow up on the actions decided.

Review your strategic planning work to date and discuss how you will document and share the plan.   

Plan how you will evaluate and update the strategic plan. At each evaluation session, plan to go over your calendar and task list. 

If you are holding a number of workshops, you will need to decide how the results will be shared and compiled. Schedule a time for a group to meet to do this work with representatives from each of the previously held workshops. You can ask the representative group to look at how the plans are similar, how they are different, whether there appears to be any conflicts between the plans that need to be resolved, and, finally, how the plans can best be integrated.

Evaluate the workshop itself. You can ask participants, verbally or in a short written form, to identify what they found most helpful in the workshop, least helpful and if they have any suggestions for improvements.