In the Philippines, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) came together with key partners to plan for protecting against COVID-19 in the workplace. They organized a four-day online series titled #ThisWorks to inspire and engage workplace communities as leaders in preventing and controlling COVID-19 at work.
This response activity came about to address an expressed need from PEZA’s employers and employees to better understand, enable and apply practical prevention and control measures in different work settings. The goal was to build on national guidelines by identifying and discussing workplace scenarios that required more targeted and context-specific recommendations. A Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Plan, with stated objectives, was developed by organizing partners during the planning stage. This plan included a pre-webinar survey (training needs analysis), immediate webinar evaluations, and a delayed evaluation on behavior change resulting from the webinar series.
The series reached over 9,000 people nationally during the live sessions; including those from private business, local government, government employees, hotel and restaurant workers, hospital workers, academia, and medical students, with a follow-up questionnaire on behavior change to be rolled out in the near future. With promotions through PEZA’s strong network nationally, several thousand more tuned-in since the series recording was posted to social media, with over 19,000 unique views of the day one webinar. Of those who responded, participant feedback on the webinar series included over 70% reporting the highest level of satisfaction (“very satisfied”); 96.9% of respondents reporting that the ideas and guidelines presented were “very clear” or “extremely clear”; and 97.5% of respondents finding the webinar series “very informative” or “extremely informative,” with the average response rating of overall content being 4.67 (on a scale of 1 to 5). After the series was completed, for the learning component of the monitoring, evaluation, and learning plan, partners met to review and debrief participant’s feedback and make plans for next steps. This included following up on outstanding questions and comments with organizers and reaching out to key stakeholders to develop additional recommendations. These follow ups with PEZA locator companies are organized by region and are currently ongoing. PEZA also planned further engagement with specific workplaces and employees to strengthen workplace protocols.
[Source: WHO (PHL)]