Form a Team
Strategic research works best as a team activity. One person can rarely do it all, and can never provide the level of detail and diversity of perspectives as a group. Additionally, the best way to create buy-in for a campaign is to have those who will be participating design the campaign. What better way to kick this off than to have a team of workers investigate their target?
Your research team should include workers from different departments and shifts. Work with local leadership to identify members who have an interest in conducting research.
Include a Project Coordinator
Our best research projects all had one common factor: an excellent project coordinator. The project coordinator is the individual from the union who will schedule the meetings, find participants, ensure that everyone has access to a computer or smartphone, and so on. But the job of the project coordinator doesn’t stop at logistics.
Conducting research, especially using a more participatory approach, is not simply a technical process. We are constantly reminded that these projects are organizational efforts that require social relationships and trust. A strong project coordinator uses their best organizing skills to repeatedly make the ask of participants by ensuring they will continue to engage with the research team.
Meet weekly for six weeks
People like to volunteer, but not forever. If you are creating a research document about your firm for the first time, we’ve found that a short six-week project that works well to kick things off. In this amount of time, it’s feasible to create a fairly comprehensive research document, conduct an analysis of your findings, and plan a campaign.
Create one shared document with all information
Our worksheet in the resources section open up a Google Doc with all the 24 questions listed. Our goal is to create one document that contains all workers’ knowledge about the firm. This is a powerful exercise that often reveals just how much workers know.
Make participation accessible
Not everyone automatically knows how to use Zoom or Google Docs or other online tools. Do your best to ensure all participants are able to engage fully in the process.
Schedule meeting times when most workers are available and only meet for about an hour. Mental fatigue sets in faster in digital meeting than those that are in-person.
Always stick to your schedule! If an hour has passed, don’t keep the team on any longer except to wrap things up. You can meet again or pick back up if you respect participants’ time, but there is no guarantee they will show up again if you continuously go over time.
Download, Copy, Paste, Annotate
It is tempting to simply look at information online without creating a record of what’s out there. While some preliminary reconnaissance is in order, we cannot analyze it all on the spot. So it is important to keep track of information you find as early as possible. This will help you to develop a more thoughtful analysis as you learn more about your firm.
We encourage researchers to cut and paste sections from original documents into a their shared document. You may also want to download some key original documents in their entirety. We don’t recommend printing since it is less economical, less environmentally friendly, and less manageable than digital files.
When pasting information from many sources into a single document, be sure to clearly demarcate between them. Also include the URL where the information came from. This will enable you to return to the source if you need additional information, and allows you to document your sources in a written report. You don’t need MLA citations! A clearly delineated URL will be helpful enough.
Focus on Primary Materials
When choosing your sources, try to focus on primary materials – that is documents either are published by the company itself or have been submitted by the company to government agencies.
There are many sites available on the internet that gather information from primary materials on firms. Some are excellent and others are incomplete and out of date. Whenever possible this website will direct you to the primary sources.
Stay on Track
You will encounter an immense amount of information; be careful not to get sidetracked. The 24 questions are you best guide, and serve as a check list to help keep you focused. At the same time, if you can’t seem to find information in a specific area, it may be best to jump to the next question. You may find the information elsewhere, or develop a more specific search strategy as you learn more about your firm.
Stop, Evaluate, and Adjust
Instead of continually plowing forward, it is important to stop periodically and evaluate your progress. Where are you in terms of your timeline? Are you harvesting too much (or not enough) information? Adjust your strategy and come up with a plan to proceed. This is particularly important if you are working as a team. Meet with your team; talk, evaluate your progress, and decide how to move forward.
Continue the work
The work is never complete, even if you have a fully-filled out version of the 24-Questions document. Just like organizing, research is not a means to an end, but a continuous process workers should engage in all the time.
Tips for Professional Organizers and Researchers
While much of this web site focuses on gathering corporate information electronically, we strongly believe that a great deal can be learned directly from rank and file workers at the company you are researching. Involving rank and file workers not only improves our research, but also involves workers from the very beginning, and engages them in the process. This helps to overcome any privileging of researchers, and sets the stage for worker involvement in the later campaign.
Tips for making this work more accessible to Rank and File Members:
- Ensure participants have reliable access to the internet, and reduce as many barriers to participation as possible, (e.g. present in multiple languages if possible).
- Choose a convenient location and time. This might mean you meet virtually!
- If you’re in person, serve food and non-alcoholic beverages.
- Adopt a brainstorming model. All ideas are important.
- Record and keep track of input on a shared document with meeting notes.
- Do not let a minority of people dominate. Draw others out.
- Do not linger in one area if there is no input.
- Allocate time to summarize what you found and identify areas to follow up on.
- Build a mentoring program where you are meeting regularly with this research team of rank-and-file workers to both provide skills training and for them to report back research findings.
- Evaluate and adjust accordingly.