Participatory organizational wellbeing interventions (POWIs) are increasingly used to address complex and persistent challenges to employee wellbeing by involving organizational members in the design and implementation of change. Yet their longer-term outcomes vary widely, raising questions about how organizational members make sense of such interventions at the point of design and enactment. This paper adopts a prospective sensemaking perspective to explain how POWIs may contribute to organizational change capability over time. Drawing on sensemaking theory, schema theory, and organizational memory, we conceptualize POWIs not merely as technical change mechanisms but as sensemaking infrastructures that shape how organizational members interpret, enact, and sustain wellbeing-oriented change. We develop a conceptual model centered on prospective sensemaking - the collective process through which organizational members construct forward-looking interpretations, imagine possible futures, and coordinate present action based on anticipated outcomes. We argue that prospective sensemaking during POWIs is grounded in organizational memory, understood as accumulated knowledge and experience from prior interventions and wellbeing initiatives. Organizational members interpret new intervention cues in relation to existing cognitive schemas, perceived source credibility, and the recency, relevance, and significance of past experiences, shaping the plausibility of intervention narratives and the dynamics of sensegiving. Building on this model, we advance five propositions linking interpretive cues, organizational memory, and collective sensemaking to the development of organizational change capability. We argue that when prospective sensemaking becomes collective and stabilized through shared meanings, POWIs are more likely to support enduring capacity for change. By theorizing the temporal and interpretive dynamics through which participatory interventions mobilize organizational memory to shape future-oriented action, this paper contributes to research on organizational wellbeing, organizational change, and sensemaking, offering a novel explanation for why some POWIs become embedded and sustained while others remain episodic. 

Background: Most employees will experience serious illness, caregiving, dying and loss (End-of-Life (EoL) experiences) at multiple points throughout their working lives. These experiences impact affected employees but also their colleagues in terms of health and well-being, and the workplace as a whole in terms of workplace safety, productivity and labour relations. The impact of EoL experiences on employees means that workplaces are called to play a more active role in providing support for EoL experiences.

Aim: To describe how the EU-CoWork (2024–2028) project addresses its main aims to (1) createCompassionate Workplace cultures, practices and policies and improve health and well-being of employees dealing with EoL experiences in different national work contexts in Europe;(2) describe and evaluate the process of co-creation and implementation of CompassionateWorkplace Programs (CWPs) and how these influence the programs’ outcomes.

Design: EU-CoWork employs a facilitated and co-creative Developmental Evaluation approach to the development of 12 tailored CWPs across four European countries (Belgium, Austria,Sweden and Greece).

Methods: To evaluate the outcomes and processes leading to these outcomes, a mixed-methods Realist Evaluation methodology is applied, formulating and testing Context-Mechanism-Outcomes configurations and combining longitudinal quantitative and qualitative data collections.

Results: EU-CoWork will generate evidence to support an expanded model of occupational health and safety risk factors sensitive to the specific challenges related to employees’ Experiences. In doing so, several challenges will have to be navigated: involving employees with EoL experiences while avoiding overburdening them, avoiding tokenistic engagement, managing power differentials, balancing the need for scientific rigour with the flexibility required in co-creation, reconciling different epistemologies and disciplinary traditions and organisational resistance to change.

Conclusion: There are potential long-lasting broader societal impacts through the stimulation of open discourse on EoL topics, the reconciliation of work and care, and changes in gendered work and care patterns.

The digitalization of retailing is restructuring consumption as well as retail work. Unlike front-line service work in stores, online retail work is defined by indirect service work at a distance from customers at warehouse sites. The rapid pace of change means that knowledge about online retail workplaces and its employees is still fragmentary. Empirically drawing on Swedish national statistics and an ongoing study of five online retail warehouses, this article explores intersections of online retail warehousing, gender and racialization, and meanings of place therein. National statistics show that online retail employs more men and more foreign-born than retailing in general. While retailing is dominated by small workplaces, online retail warehouses are either small or large and the proportion of women and Swedish-born is lower at the larger warehouses than the small ones. Occupational data show that the proportion of women and foreign-born people is significantly lower among online retail managers than among warehouse workers. Further nuances are provided by the qualitative insights from the five studied warehouses. Almost only women worked in the two smaller warehouses, which was explained by references to the nature of the work. At the larger, more gender-balanced warehouses, examples of segregation between employees of the same category were found, as was the importance of place for hierarchies between workers and managers. More so, the study makes evident that place matters also for the boundary making around and between online retail workplaces, especially in relation to racialization processes. While inequality, place and work in retail stores are about conditional access to employment, in online retail warehouses the matter seems to be more about how certain bodies’ lack of mobility and opportunities in the labor market at large left them “stuck” in online retailing.

För snart 20 år sedan publicerades artikeln ’Inequality in the Toy Store’ (Williams 2004) med resultat från en studie i detaljhandelns butiker. Williams (2004) konstaterade att arbetsplatsernas hierarkier var könade och rasifierade, med synliga (o)jämlikhetsmönster organiseringen av arbete och arbetare (jfr Van Oort, 2019). Sedan dess har handelsarbetets gränser förskjutits – det direkta servicearbete som görs av handelsanställda i butik har kompletterats med indirekt servicearbete utfört av e-handelsanställda på lager. Studier i lagermiljö har visar på en könad och rasifierad ojämlikhet mellan anställda, både vad gäller anställningsvillkor, arbetsmiljö och vilken typ av arbetsuppgifter anställda tilldelas (Rydström m.fl., 2023). I en svensk kontext har Handelsanställdas förbund belyst att repetitiva och monotona arbetsmoment och stor personalomsättning påverkar e-handelsanställdas hälsa negativt, och kvinnor rapporterar en generellt sämre hälsa än män (Rosenström 2016). 

Presentationen bygger på en tvärvetenskaplig studie (2020–2023) om (o)jämlikhet, arbetsvillkor och arbetsmiljö i e-handeln. Under hösten 2022 undersöktes tre e-handelslager genom tekniska mätningar av arbetsbelastningen, enkätstudier och fokusgruppsintervjuer med anställda, enskilda intervjuer med chefer och fackliga representanter samt arbetsplatsbesök och observationer. Presentationen fokuserar primärt på materialet från de kvalitativa delarna av studien, vilket kodats och analyserats med hjälp av Acker’s (2006) teori om ojämlikhetsregimer. 

Preliminära resultat visar på både likheter och skillnader mellan de tre e-handelslagrens (o)jämlikhetsmönster och anställdas upplevelser av sin arbetssituation. E-handelslagren skiljer sig åt i storlek och typen av varor som hanteras, med olika nivåer av automation i plock- och packarbetet. Gemensamt är att ojämlikhetsregimer – det vill säga, könade och rasifierade hierarkiska klassrelationer (Acker 2006) – återfinns på e-handelsföretagen och reproducerar ojämlika arbetsvillkor för kvinnor och män, svenskfödda och utrikesfödda som arbetar på lagergolvet.