Identifying stakeholders and engagement strategies

Covering Assessment Criterion 2.2 of 5CO03, this video addresses the question of who needs to be involved when designing inclusive people practices and how to reach them. It works through a structured taxonomy of stakeholder categories: those directly impacted by a given initiative, those with relevant insights or contributions to offer, partners in joint working, and those who hold authority or responsibility in the area concerned. Concrete examples anchor each category — a new performance management system and a parental leave policy are used to illustrate how both direct and indirect effects shape who belongs in scope.

A significant portion of the video is devoted to the challenge of reaching stakeholders whose perspectives are least often captured in conventional design processes. It draws attention to part-time workers, employees on fixed-term contracts, night shift staff, remote and dispersed workers, and employee network groups representing disabled employees, LGBTQ+ staff, and employees from ethnic minority backgrounds. Trade union representatives, occupational health providers, pension trustees, and internal specialists such as legal advisors and IT teams also feature as distinct stakeholder groups, each with different rationales for inclusion.

The video then turns to the engagement strategies themselves, covering discussion-based methods including focus groups, workshops, and one-to-one interviews, alongside documentary and electronic approaches such as written consultation documents, online surveys, and collaborative asynchronous platforms. Psychological safety is treated as a central condition for effective engagement, with attention given to group composition and facilitation practice. The video closes by connecting the choice and combination of these methods to the goal of enabling a genuinely diverse range of voices to contribute to people practice design.