Develop engagement strategy to nudge effective behaviour change

MAKE partnered with a United Nations agency whose mandate is to advance social and economic justice by setting international labour standards, with the challenge of building an employer engagement strategy that protected foreign domestic workers’ rights from abusive and fraudulent recruitment and placement processes.

Prior to engaging MAKE, attempts at engaging employers in Hong Kong to change their recruitment behaviour had been unsuccessful, with some industries sketpical  of change.

The agency engaged MAKE to collaborate with their team to deliver an employer engagement strategy that puts human rights at the centre of considerations. The agency also wanted help in the design and delivery of a workshop with the aim of sharing techniques on influencing employer behaviour change with representatives from labour unions, businesses, NGOs, civil society and the media.

MAKE had our work cut out to reframe the agency's remit to employers across Hong Kong, but sought a way forward by first conducting baseline research with local employers of domestic workers and fair employment agencies to understand the challenges they face, identifying the motivators of ethical employer’s behaviours.

From there our MAKErs worked to develop a customised toolkit and action plan that empowered the agency with the confidence to create interventions to influence the desired behaviour change in reluctant audiences.

MAKE worked closely with the the agency to deliver solutions fit for the challenges they were facing in the employment marketplace by developing and facilitating a full day multi-stakeholder workshop. The workshop brought together different stakeholders in the problem space, such as labour unions, businesses, NGOs, civil society, and media, for a day of collaboration and co-design, intervention ideas and prototypes, which were prioritised into action plans.

In support of the workshop, MAKE developed a customised toolkit to complement the agency’s new approach to work within their new engagement strategy. The tailor-made Design Thinking tool-kit was developed to support the the agency’s team moving forward, empowering them to affect meaningful change for employees.

During the full-day workshop, 82 ideas were generated and categorised into 11 main buckets which offered the agency multiple avenues to explore garnering support for their employer engagement strategy.