Employee Involvement - What it Can Do For Your Business

While bonuses and raises have been the conventional approach to increasing worker productivity, the sluggish business environment has prevented such financial rewards from being practical on a regular basis. Fortunately, money is not the only way to motivate people. Employee involvement is a strategy that allows a business to transform its culture and boost its bottom line by focusing on employee satisfaction by involving employees.

What is Employee Involvement?
Employee involvement is a organization-wide strategy that focuses on empowering workers by letting them have a say when it comes to the issues that impact their jobs. For those who have grown up in the traditional corporate environment, this is a complete departure from what many people are used to seeing.

As any manager will tell you, there is a clear difference between employees who are only there to collect a paycheck and those that are passionate about their jobs. Staff who do not feel like they have a sense of direction and control over their professional lives often resign themselves to doing the bare minimum. Letting employees have a stake in their work environments can be a source of motivation. It creates a sense of personal ownership and encourages people to take things more personally.

Employee Involvement Techniques - How Do You Involve Employees?
Generally speaking, involved employees = motivated employees = productive employees. One quick and easy technique for getting employees involved is to ask for their input on things that affect them. You could do that by asking them to bring one idea on how to improve their working environment to the next team meeting. Or you could of course trial Vetter for a month (it’s free) - but enough about us!

Here are a few other techniques that companies can explore with their employees:

• Self-Managed Projects - give staff some autonomy
  
• A Collaborative Decision-Making Process - if there’s a decision to be made, for example on deciding how shifts will be split, involve the people affected in deciding what to do.
  
• A Task Force that Focuses Exclusively on Employee Issues
  
• Create a ‘Hack Day’ - once a month, let employees work on anything they wish related to work. They could research a new product or experiment with a new process for example.
  

Employee involvement in Safety
One area where staff are very motivated to contribute and eager to get involved is in Safety. It’s an excellent area to start in. Management can encourage staff to get involved in Safety training/procedures by providing them with what they need according to Earl Blair of Blair Safety Services: “Offer the necessary levels of education, training, resources, and authority so employees can take ownership of the safety process. It’s a mistake to expect employees to take pride and be enthusiastically involved over the long term in order to simply conform to top-down management programs, and/or merely comply with OSHA regulations. The single most powerful source of motivation is employee ownership of the safety process” .

Why Involve Employees? What are the Benefits of Employee Involvement?
The benefits that we’ve see and read about are:

• Improved Workplace Camaraderie
  
• Increased Productivity
  
• Improved Engagement and job satisfaction
  
• A rise in Employee Retention
  
• Improved Service and Product quality
  
• Workplace safety improves
  

Whether you are in retail, hospitality, or finance, your organization can benefit directly from making the needs of employees a top priority. You can kick off a Staff Involvement campaign today, in a very simple way, by asking for employee ideas on how to improve their workplace. Why not give it a try?

Sources:

http://www.ishn.com/articles/how-to-get-your-managers-and-employees-involved-in-safety

http://www.inc.com/guides/2010/08/10-things-employees-want.html

http://www.pacificpile.com/front/showcontent.aspx?fileid=53&p=Safety