What Needs to Improve and for Whom When We Implement Organisational Interventions?

A key requisite for successful organisational interventions is participation, meaning that employees and managers in collaboration identify and implement changes to the way work is organised, designed and managed (Nielsen & Noblet, 2018). From a scientific standpoint, the dominant method used to evaluate whether such interventions achieve the intended outcomes, in particular better employee wellbeing and working conditions, is the analyses of changes over time, for example through comparing before and after surveys distributed to workers (Richardson & Rothstein, 2008). If a significant improvement in wellbeing has happened, then researchers conclude that the intervention was a success. Less attention has been paid to if and how organisational members perceive the intervention to be a success (von Thiele Schwarz et al., 2021). Indeed, von Thiele Schwarz et al. (2021) argued that interventions should not only benefit science, but also the participating organisations.

In this debate paper, we build on Weick’s sensemaking theory (Weick, 1995) and argue that engaging in organisational interventions provides stimuli and cues that organisational members translate into cognitive schemata. This sensemaking process is important to understand as it may influence how the organisational members will engage in future initiatives to improve employee wellbeing – and this sustainability should be included as a key part of whether an intervention is successful or not. We term this sustainability perspective change capability, i.e., as part of the intervention, organisational members should learn how to continually engage in improvement processes to improve employee wellbeing (Nielsen & Abildgaard, 2013). We propose a dual intervention outcome model integrating improvements in wellbeing and change capability. Thus, an intervention is successful when we find alignment between the before-and-after evaluation of wellbeing and organisational members’ sensemaking of the intervention in relation to improvements in both organisational members’ perceptions of their change capability and employee wellbeing. Finally, we not only propose how the model can be used in the evaluation of the organisational interventions but also how it may be used as a dialogue tool to support the intervention process.