Toggle high contrast

The missing half million

How unions can transform themselves to be a movement of young workers
Author
Clare Coatman
Former TUC Campaigner (left post in 2021)
Report type
Research and reports
Issue date
Research methodology: innovation

The TUC chose to take an audience-led and insight-led innovation approach. There can be a misconception that innovation means doing something completely new and different, but it more commonly takes existing offers or practices and augments or updates them based on new information.

Many charities and campaigning organisations have added an innovation approach to their work. Almost all of the top 25 UK charities have a dedicated innovation team – but this is not usual practice in the trade union movement.

We recognised that we didn’t hold the necessary innovation experience or expertise in-house to complete this project, and so partnered with Good Innovation, a consultancy specialising in not-for-profit organisations. Good Innovation guided us through a process to learn more about the challenges we faced and the context we are operating in from the existing knowledge in the union movement and from our own primary research. Then we moved on to generate ideas based on what we heard, and experimented to improve the ideas through testing.

Good Innovation’s approach to the project
Good Innovation’s approach to the project
Insight from user testing is captured and synthesised
Insight from user testing is captured and synthesised

We conducted extensive user research into young workers’ needs, behaviours and motivations. In autumn 2016 the first cohort of around 50 young workers completed a series of tasks using WhatsApp. These tasks ran over the course of a week and explored how they felt about work, what their top issues were and how they felt about talking to colleagues about shared issues.

We used WhatsApp as a channel to interact with our research participants because they already use and feel comfortable with it. There were other platforms that would have been easier for the project team, but it was part of our approach to lower the barriers of participation to the group we were trying to reach. This meant going to where they were, rather than expecting them to come to us.

The results from WhatsApp shaped a discussion guide for face-to-face interviews with each of the respondents, in locations around the UK. We asked each of the respondents to bring a friend to the interview as well. Conducting the interviews in pairs both put the participants more at ease and doubled our reach.

The results of the interviews were synthesised using thousands of post-it notes, and a set of key insights was identified. We checked the insights gained with an online panel of new young workers to validate what we thought we had understood, and had it confirmed. That insight is discussed in the next section.

In total we engaged more than 300 young workers in testing at different phases.

Being led by our target audience

Having a clear target audience in mind is essential to developing a new offer. Young workers are far from a homogeneous group and so we needed to be more specific in order to be effective. We identified a narrower target audience who we called 'young core workers'.

Young core workers:

  • are 21–30 years old. We chose a slightly older group as we believed they were more likely to be working in a sector they might stay in. As union membership is tied to workplace and role, we were looking to understand young workers who were less likely to move on imminently. We also hypothesised that those in their twenties might be that little more likely to take action due to slightly higher confidence and slightly greater experience of the world of work.
  • earn low to median wages. This was primarily because we wanted to reach those most in need of the help of trade unions.
  • are not in full-time education. Young core workers may be studying part time but work is the main focus in their lives.
  • work in the private sector. We focused on retail, hospitality and private-sector social care where young workers are overrepresented, while trade unions are underrepresented. However, the research findings and results of the project apply much more broadly across almost all sectors to some degree.
  • have never been members of a trade union. Younger workers are less likely to be union members than older workers. Young core workers are less likely to be members than the average young worker. 2 We therefore focused our research on the average member of our target group.
  • work for an employer of more than 50 staff. We hypothesised it would be easier to move young workers to action in companies with enough other staff to form a collective.

Of course, young core workers are not homogenous. Even within this narrower target audience there is a wide variety of life experience and circumstance. Perhaps most importantly, one-third of this group are parents.

Having defined an audience, it’s important to listen to them and believe what they say – even if it goes against our assumptions.

In this project we recruited young core workers using a market research agency. This was expensive, but by definition unions are not in touch with this group, so we had no other way to ensure high-quality feedback from the right people. Talking to young workers already active in their unions would have given us very different answers, which may have led us to develop a programme that did not meet the needs of young core workers.

Building in time to develop a thoughtful approach to reaching the right audience for your research is valuable. It can be done more cheaply – such as reaching out through your own or colleagues’ personal networks – as long as you are sure that you are talking to the people you’re designing the solution for. The important thing is how much you learn about the audience from the group themselves.

Tip: Thinking specifically about who we want to bring into the movement will help us be more effective at reaching them and growing.


 

Using personas

Personas are a way of bringing research findings to life. They can be used to help you get a feel for your overall audience or sub-audiences within it. In this way personas help you stay focused on who you’re trying to reach. Thinking about an offer from the perspective of a clearly defined persona is a good way to cut out your own preconceived ideas.

You can add detail to personas over time and it’s common to have print-outs of personas in your workspace, so that all members of a team can share a common understanding of that persona and apply it in a consistent way.

Evidence-led

Instead of using assumptions or gut instinct, an innovation approach uses experiments with your audience, and then analyses the results to identify insights and make decisions.

You can test lots of aspects of your offer, but testing is often used to decide language, look and feel. We found that what some people think young people want isn't very accurate. For example, a designer trying to tailor something for young people may use lively colours and shapes and graffiti-style writing: but our findings indicate that a simple, clean design with a fresh, modern feel is more appealing.

You can do testing in person or online. In person you get more insight as you’re able to ask why people think something or behave in a certain way, rather than just seeing the behaviour.

Using social media ads to test effectively

Targeting
Target your social media ads at the group you want to speak to. For this project we targeted Facebook ads by age, location and a set of interests that were designed to match our personas. We also tested sub-groups by industry they work in, by gender and by parenthood. It’s possible to target ads at the employees of some companies or workers by some job titles.

Testing comms
By creating different versions of Facebook and Instagram ads, varying the text and images, you can find what is most effective. Put a small budget behind the ads for a few days then put the remainder of your budget behind the best-performing version. This results in a much higher click-through rate and a lower cost per person signing up.

Testing concepts
We also tested concepts using a technique called smoke screen testing. You can gauge interest in a campaign issue or offer that doesn’t exist yet by running ads for it that go to a landing page to sign up for further information, rather than building the campaign or service in full before being sure the desire is there. This is an example of working in a low-cost, low-effort (lean) way.

Being more agile and lean

Delivering projects in a more agile and lean way means starting with the problem rather than the solution, and building on (iterating) what you’re delivering as you learn more about what’s needed and what’s working. The goal of working in this way is to help mitigate risk and increase chances of success. Developing the quickest, cheapest version at each point to get the answers you need – rather than jumping straight to building a final version – minimises wasting time and money.

For example, in this innovation programme we started with the problem of ‘how can we better reach young workers?’. After the research phase we updated the problem to ‘what offer can we make that meets the needs of young workers while also lowering their barriers to collective organising?’ (see Primary research findings below). We then developed the concept of a career-coaching app. It would have been a very expensive mistake to make an app that didn’t truly meet our needs and young worker’s expectations, so we developed the exact functionality and content through prototyping first.

Prototypes (mock-ups) are a common tool when testing out ideas. They just need to give someone enough of a sense of what you’re proposing to get a response. For example, before we developed WorkSmart as an app we used paper prototypes – literally showing our idea on paper and without any time going into design. When testing content later, we used PowerPoint presentations on a phone that market research participants could swipe through in testing sessions as if the content were on the app.

It was amazing how much we learned from these very simple prototypes without spending any money building something only to find out it may not be wanted. This approach is also an opportunity to co-create the solutions with the target audience. They’re the experts in what they want, so it makes sense to work with them to design and improve solutions.

Paper prototype testing language in the WorkSmart app
Paper prototype testing language in the WorkSmart app

Agility comes back in once you have reactions to prototypes – most commonly you will need to adjust your plans to take into account the new evidence you’ve just heard.

We also used elements of formal agile project management. We ran the project in a series of sprints, identifying the outcomes we wanted for each block of time but not always specifying how to achieve the outcome. We didn’t plan the next sprint until the previous one was completed.

When working towards an unknown goal, and learning as you go, there’s a lot of scope for change and it pays to build that into how you manage the project. This makes it hard to run as a standard project, where you plan all your activity from start to finish at the outset and then work through it linearly. Agile working involves iterating the project plan as well as the product itself.

Breaking down the work into stages, each focusing on researching, testing and evaluating an aspect of the project, helped us factor the (often very significant) changes and learning into the rest of the work as we progressed.

Tip: Think about what one thing you want to try doing differently after reading this.

Enable Two-Factor Authentication

To access the admin area, you will need to setup two-factor authentication (TFA).

Setup now