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This section examines the following evaluation questions: How do participants become aware of the LMPP? Is there a need to improve awareness of the LMPP? And if so, how could awareness be improved? Could the program be fine-tuned to broaden its scope and enhance its effectiveness? If the level of funding were raised, would the annual LMPP budget be sufficient to meet the demand for LMPP?

8.1 Awareness of the LMPP

Participants became aware of the LMPP through a variety of avenues.

The largest percentage of case study participants reported that they became aware of the LMPP through a pre-existing, longstanding relationship with HRDC. Four projects cited this relationship as their reason for becoming aware of the program. Sponsors of four projects became aware of the program through collective bargaining and union events. Other means of becoming aware of the LMPP included corporate contacts, other governmental programs, previous involvement with LMPP, HRDC conciliators and the Internet.

Increased program awareness and broadening the reach of the LMPP were identified as areas for improvement.

Several key informants expressed concerns regarding the way by which participants become aware of the LMPP, as indicated by the following comments:

• "[I] must admit that the program is not as well-known as it should be. There should be more information about its objectives and benefits to both labour and employers, available at regional HRDC offices, as well as the funding application process; and the HRDC web-site should put more emphasis on the benefits, especially to unions and workers in the federal sector."
• "[The] HRDC web-site has improved in the past year, but it still doesn't give any emphasis to LMPP to grab a surfer's attention. You have to search, and that means you already know something about it - nothing for people "outside the loop".
• "[The LMPP] needs to share the positive results of the program in order to attract more participants."

As noted in Section 4.1, repeat users account for over a third (36.7 percent) of the 120 projects in the evaluation period. The number of repeat users who access LMPP also raises questions about awareness and the reach of the program. As one key informant commented: "With the amount of repeat users we need to ask: 'Are we becoming the source of their funding? Are there not any other interested parties?' " These comments about awareness and repeat users underline the need for improved marketing of LMPP, a concern that was echoed in key informant interviews with LMPP staff.

These observations also pointed to the need for better marketing and information dissemination (including best practices or lessons learned) as well as efforts to encourage wider engagement of labour and management in such processes. The range of suggestions pointed to the potential value of developing a comprehensive marketing strategy. Also the research noted that a survey of potential clients to assess awareness of LMPP could be a useful adjunct to program marketing strategy.

As a more comprehensive market strategy will almost certainly generate more applications for LMPP funding, it will probably be necessary to develop a way to refine the current set of program funding priorities to direct LMPP funding towards a more select range of labour-management projects. This need may also promote "marketing" opportunities. By giving the priority development process a profile and involving labour and management groups, such a process could also be used as a way to increase the awareness and reach of the LMPP.

8.2 Other Areas Where the LMPP Could be Fine Tuned

There is a need to consider ways to ensure that project funding can better encourage or maximize the sustainability of results.

The issue of the sustainability of results surfaced repeatedly in the participant survey and the case studies. Although the large majority of survey respondents and case studies indicated positive impacts of LMPP projects on labour-management relationships, many LMPP participants expressed concern that project benefits were not lasting.²⁶

There appeared to be no mechanisms in place at this time that would encourage or lead to the long-term adoption of project results and sustain project-related labour-management partnerships. Comments highlighting the need to develop ways to ensure and monitor sustainability included: "You have to get [commitments] in writing otherwise [the project] will only have a short-term effect;" and "It is hard to keep these initiatives going. [It requires] long-term involvement and commitment to it."

In addition, another key informant noted that sustainability and dissemination of program results were key issues that the LMPP needed to address. It was noted that the program needed to finance projects that were transferable to other workplaces, sectors and industries, such as informational tools and that, at present, the program was financing too many "short-term deals" that did not have the potential for sustainable results that could be extended to other workplaces.

A related concern was the lack of funding for follow-up activities and ongoing maintenance of the projects or project results. For example, one participant explained: "Issues are ongoing. More money is needed for a longer period of time to pursue research and thus [aid] people to do ongoing committee work. It is still much cheaper than work slowdowns due to stressful situations."

These concerns point to the need to consider strategies for increasing the sustainability of results. This could include encouraging program applicants to build their projects around the goal of creating sustainability, but not creating an expectation of ongoing LMPP funding.

There is a need to consider increasing the level of the cap on project funding and to consider clear goals about what the additional funding could achieve.

A further concern is that in recent years, the annual LMPP budget has not been entirely used (as shown in Annex C). This is a concern, because a program with benefits as positive as those evidenced by this evaluation should be used to the utmost. This may point to other reasons for raising the "cap": to ensure operational factors such as translation are adequately funded, to ensure better evaluation, and to create the conditions for more sustainable projects.

Concern was expressed by key informants, however, that raising the cap on funding (without specific goals) could result in higher expenditures without corresponding increases in results. As one senior key informant noted: "[Raising funding] might obtain more valuable results from essentially longer-term projects, but this would require careful monitoring and accountability." Thus, before providing additional funding, the LMPP would need to ensure that project proposals included clear goals for the additional funding, along with long-term strategies for sustainability and transferability of results.

There is a need to facilitate the transferability of program results to workplaces.

Another issue related to sustainability is the ease by which information from the projects can be transferred to the workplace or to other environments. This concern was raised by the case study analysis. For example, a participant of a study tour noted that the information learned would be difficult to transfer to his respective workplace. Another project on conflict resolution raised concerns about the ongoing maintenance of the project, although the participant suggested that people who had taken a "Train-the-Trainer" session would be able to take back to the workplace the knowledge and skills they had learned.

There are some pressures to consider expanding the scope of the program.

Although the LMPP was generally seen as valuable, its reach was seen as limited. For example, it was noted that, "While the Minister of Labour is responsible for all matters related to labour relations, over which Parliament has jurisdiction, to perform this very broad mandate, the only programmatic, non-legislative tool she has at the moment is LMPP.... [and that] the LMPP is too narrowly defined now to serve its purposes of developing innovative approaches to the employer-worker relationship (since it does not apply to non-union workplaces)."

Key informants were positive about the program and emphasized its importance because of the lack of alternative programming at the federal or provincial level for projects related to workplace innovation.

Footnotes

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In the results of the telephone interview survey of LMPP participants, 64 percent of respondents mentioned sustainability as a concern. In a small follow-up survey, 13 percent of 30 workplace participants re-contacted for further insight on the sustainability issue stated that sustainability of benefits were short-term, while 17 percent indicated benefits were permanent, with most participants giving an "in-between assessment" that impacts were in the medium-long term range.