The Case for Employee Involvement and Engagement
Partnership and Workplace Innovation
Employee involvement and participation has the ability to increase productivity and the rate of productivity growth or learning. Across the world, organisations are turning to employees, in formal employee involvement processes, in teams, and in other informal participative-type arrangements, to achieve higher performance. Innovative programmes of employee participation and involvement are transforming organisations. Employees are invigorating how organisations innovate, add value and in general deliver improved products and/ or services.
Employee involvement and participation increases the company’s strategic capacity, because more people are placed in a position to consider what they know and are asked how it can be used to improve the organisation. This process of ongoing learning increases organisational flexibility: people are interested in change and learning because in a participative environment it is to their mutual advantage. This flexibility provides these organisations with an ability to cope with increased levels of complexity and change.
Employee involvement arrangements embrace innovation and cost responsibility as a challenge facing everyone in an organisation. Participation expands the organisational ability to innovate but the dependency of employees on each other and on the principle of information sharing and communication means that this activity is always transparent and always accountable.
International Evidence
Below are a few brief examples of research-based evidence of the impact of employee involvement and participation on business performance.
- At Oticon creative work practices and commitment to staff development resulted in new product lead-time halving; sales growing at 20% when the market was shrinking by 5% each year; and greater levels of innovation. (Boudewijn and Williams (2002)
- Tegral achieved greater adaptability to customer requests based on partnership, work re-organisation and gainsharing (NCPP (2002)
- A Finnish study, Nordflex project, found that 37% of organisations defined as flexible introduced new products over the last 3 years. The comparable figure for organisations defined as traditional was 3%. (EU Expert Panel IR and Innovation (2002)
- An evaluation of Irish organisations using employee participation and involvement arrangements found significant improvements in how orders were processed, the pace of work and the level of quality. (Totterdill and Sharpe (1999)
- Ecco, a shoe manufacturer, introduced a test facility which was operated by teams of machinists who discussed, challenged and improved the instructions they received from designers. The aim was for machinists to come up with practical guidance to make the mass production cheaper, easier and more attractive. They also eliminated design mistakes before new designs were sent to overseas companies for manufacturing. Previously, the machinists would have been engaged almost exclusively in monotonous, repetitive tasks. (Milsome and Sharpe (2002)
Additional research evidence
A new study of Ireland's top companies which confirms the strong link between bottom-line business performance and the use of High Performance Work Systems (HPWS) in the workplace, including strategic human-resource management, partnership, diversity & equality strategies, and flexible working arrangements.
Results of a 2004 survey conducted by the NCPP on a sample of the top 1000 companies in Ireland, demonstrating significant business benefits to organisations, including increased turnover and profitability.
A review of international studies showing a wide range of business benefits identified through empiricical research in the US, Germany, the UK, etc.
