Strategic Planning

 

Strategic action planning helps us collectively analyse our union, define how we would want the union to be and what changes are needed. It can be an overall plan for the entire union, or it can focus in on a specific area where action is needed.

If you are already clear on where the union needs to focus, you may want to move directly to the Tool Box materials on campaigning and organising (link), collective bargaining (link), organisational transformation (link) or advocacy (link). 

The strategic planning materials are designed to create a successful planning process by including as many workers and delegates as well as the elected leadership and top union decision-makers. This will help identify the problems, priorities and potential solutions and ensure broad-based support for the strategic plan and its implementation.

A good and effective strategic plan will help the union prepare for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead rather than react to the difficulties of the moment. If we do not plan for the future of our unions, we can be sure that other forces will.

Before you begin working with these materials on Strategic Planning, make sure you have reviewed the other Core Materials, including the materials on Analysis, Setting Goals and Working Collectively.

These strategic planning materials include the following steps: see TOC

Does the union spend most of its time reacting to urgent emergencies without time or resources to plan ahead?

If so, how does this impact workers, members and leaders of the union?

Is now a good time for the union to create a strategic plan? If so, why?

What will be the central focus of the strategic plan?

Are there one or two prioritised problems or areas that need to be addressed or will you be looking at the union as a whole?

Why is it important that the strategic plan focuses on these areas at this time?

For what time period will you be planning - 1-3 years? Longer? Shorter?

What decision-making bodies of the union will need to endorse the strategic plan?


Mandate

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.

What union leaders and union organisational structures (membership convention, congress, executive board …) need to endorse and support a strategic planning process?


Core Committee

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.

How will the core committee members be recruited and what leaders and organisational structures will they be in communication with and accountable to?  

How often will they meet?


Strategic Planning Workshops

A workshop (whether it is online or in person) is important to build collective ownership and decision-making around a strategic plan. If a workshop is not possible, then a series of meetings or education sessions can be planned. 

Below is a sample agenda that will need to be adjusted to fit your situation. 

Sample Agenda for Strategic Planning Workshop

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.

How many strategic planning workshops (or meetings) will you organise and who will attend? Will they be online or in person? How will you recruit participants? Will you run into any problems recruiting participants, and if so, how can you overcome them?

How can you ensure that the workshop participants are representative of all parts of the union?

How will the workshops and the strategic planning process be evaluated?

Analysis and Background Reports

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:

☐ Calendars with fixed events such as holidays, elections, contract expiration dates marked
☐ Union bylaws and constitution
☐ Collective bargaining agreements
☐ Internal election information
☐ Union budgets – actual and projected
☐ Brief description of the union leadership and organisational structure
☐ Brief statement of the union’s financial condition
☐ Total number of union members and breakdown by gender, language, race, ethnicity
☐ List of workplaces and industries with the number of members at each
☐ Information about unorganised workers
☐ Current list of union delegates and elected leaders
☐ Major events or developments in the past
☐ Major events or developments anticipated in the future
☐ Information on specific challenges, threats or opportunities the union is facing
☐ Results of Participatory Action Research surveys and interviews with workers (link 2.3.)
☐ Other…

What background reports and research need to be done before you begin the workshops? 

Will you share the background reports ahead of the workshop and if so, when and with whom?

Mission Statement

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.

Review your current mission statement if you have one.


Write a few short sentences for each of the following:

  • Describe the union, who we are, what we are here to do and why.
  • What times in the history of the union are you most proud of?
  • What are one to three of the union’s core strengths and values?
  • Think ahead 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, 25 years, 100 years, 500 years or longer.
    Where you would like the union to be now and in the future?

Share your answers with others, noting the elements that you want to include in the mission statement.

Revise and edit to create a mission statement that is concise and clear to workers, union leaders, community allies, the public and employers.

 

Problems and Priorities

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.

List and define the problem(s) that the union is facing.

Why is it important for the union to act now to resolve the problem(s)?

Prioritise the problems you have listed.

Imagination

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.

How can you imagine the union resolving the problem(s) you have listed?

If you had three wishes, what would they be?

If you were given unlimited resources to resolve this problem, what would you do?

If no solution was too fantastic, strange or controversial, what might you imagine?

Goals

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.

Benchmarks

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.

For each of the problems you have identified, list your goals, objectives and benchmarks.

Calendaring and Commitments

Create or revise your calendar. Include the dates of the benchmarks you have just created. Review and adjust. 

If your calendar seems overwhelming, prioritise and cut back the number of goals, objectives and benchmarks. 

Break down each objective into tasks that must be accomplished. For example, the mentors for the delegates will need to be recruited. In the example given above, the mentors will need to be trained. The delegates who might want mentors will need to be identified and spoken to. For each task that is to be accomplished, identify one person who will be responsible for its completion and the date by which the task will be completed.

 

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

Create a calendar and list of tasks that participants have committed to.

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.


Follow-up and Evaluations

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.

Document and prepare to share the strategic plan you have created.

How often will you evaluate and update the strategic plan? Annually, biannually or more often? Who will participate?

When and who will present the strategic plan for adoption by the appropriate union governing body (membership convention, congress, executive board …)?

How will you provide regular updates, evaluation and tracking of the strategic plan?