Co-production in Action: What We’ve Achieved Together

Shaped by Experience: How Co-production is Building a Better Work and Health Trial

The WISHES trial is exploring whether job crafting — the practice of reshaping how you work to better suit your needs — can create more inclusive and accessible workplaces for disabled workers and people with long-term health conditions.

From the very start, we have been designing the trial with the people it is meant to help, not just for them. This process is called co-production, and it has fundamentally shaped the trial.

We work closely with our Lived Experience Group (LEG) and Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs), meeting regularly to co-design the trial’s tools, activities, and materials. Their knowledge and expertise has directly changed what we are doing and how we are doing it, in three important ways.

Making the trial accessible and inclusive

Firstly, we have worked to ensure that every part of the trial — written materials, digital platforms, workshops, and research interviews — uses accessible language and formats. This includes producing Easy Read versions of key documents with our partners at Speakup and ensuring that the workshop experience is inclusive for people with visual, and other, impairments.

Co-production work also highlighted practical needs that researchers might otherwise have missed. Workshops need to be flexible in their timing, format, and location to accommodate different learning and communication styles. And it is essential that participants feel safe to share as much or as little about their health or impairment as they choose.

Adapting job crafting techniques for disabled workers

Secondly, existing job crafting tools were designed with a general workforce in mind. Our co-production work has helped us adapt them to better reflect the wider range of experiences and circumstances that disabled workers bring to the job.

For example, job crafting prompt cards use everyday words to spark thinking about change. Working with LEG members, we reviewed how words like “energy” and “effort” can land very differently depending on someone’s health condition, and we developed new sets of prompts as a result.

We also adapted the job mapping tool to capture life and challenges outside of work, not just tasks and interactions within the job itself.

Rethinking how we measure health and disability

Thirdly, when we began working through our survey questions with LEG members, we realised something important: many standard survey tools are built on a medical model of disability. This is the idea that disability is a problem located entirely within the individual.

The WISHES trial takes a different view. We are interested in how workplace structures and environments shape job crafting and, in turn, health and work outcomes. This is known as the social model of disability.

As a result, we have worked with the LEG to revise key survey questions. The Work Ability Index, one of our main measures, has been significantly adapted to better reflect the social model — recognising that a person’s ability to work is shaped by their environment, not just their health condition.

Why co-production matters

When the people most affected by a research project are involved in designing the study, the result is research that is better grounded in real experience, more likely to reach the people it is intended for, and more likely to produce findings that can really make a difference.

Effective co-production needs all members of the research team to be open to change and to understand that working in this way means not doing things the way we’ve always done them. This is often a process of negotiation and it takes time and, sometimes, compromise.