What means giving employees greater involvement in their jobs and the organizations operations by increasing their participation in decision making?

Employee involvementrefers to work structures and processes that allow employees to systematically give their input into decisions that effect their own work. Some examples of employee involvement include:

• Continuous Improvement teams
• formal quality of work life programs
• quality control circles
• flatter organizational structures
• labor management problem solving efforts
• employee problem solving task forces and teams
• structured suggestion systems

Depending on your background or specialty, you may refer to it as engagement, voice, participation, democracy, etc. Effective organizations everywhere understand the importance of employee involvement in all levels of work and researcher has found strong links between employee involvement and important work outcomes, which will be described below.

What is employee involvement?

So what exactly is employee involvement and how can organizations benefit from it? Employee involvement can be defined as:

When employees participate directly to help an organization fulfill its mission and meet its objectives by applying their ideas, expertise, and efforts towards problem solving and decision making

More specifically, employee participation can be broken into: representative participation (through unions), direct communication, and upward problem solving. To simplify, we will focus on the latter two categories because, although unions do help ensure that the employee “voice” is heard, this blog article is more about understanding outcomes, tools, and methods. Employee involvement is something that can be present at varying degrees within an organization, and is reinforced by leadership, culture and environment.

Changing an organization from a strict top-down hierarchy to one that engages employees at all levels to make decisions is not an easy thing to do- it involves not only structure and policy changes but also cultural change, which takes time, effort, and expertise. That being said, organizations from every industry are applying the concepts of employee involvement to drive the continual improvement of their processes and performance.

Outcomes & Benefits

To understand the benefits of employee involvement, let’s take a look at what the research has to say. The following outcomes of employee involvement initiatives have been identified through empirical organizational research:

• Increased employee productivity across industries, even for low-skilled employees that do routine tasks (Jones, Kalmi, & Kauhanen, 2010)
• In manufacturing, employee involvement programs are a long term investment, but one that leads to increased plant performance over time (Jones & Kato, 2005)
• Improved organizational decision-making capability (Apostolou, 2000)
• Improved attitude regarding work (Leana, Ahlbrandt, & Murrell, 1992)
• Substantially improved employee well-being (Freeman & Kleiner, 2005)
• Reduced costs through elimination of waste and reduced product cycle times (Apostolou, 2000)
• Leads to employee empowerment, job satisfaction, creativity, commitment, and motivation, as well as intent to stay [secondary effect] (Apostolou, 2000; Light, 2004)

How to “get” employee involvement

In order for an employee involvement process to be effective, three things need to be present:

1. Employees need to be given the authority to participate in substantive decisions
2. Employees need to have the appropriate decision-making skills
3. Incentives to participate (whether implicit or explicit) must be present

Like I said earlier, sustaining an entire employee involvement process is no easy task. It would require the work of highly trained internal or external consultants with expertise in assessment, training, management education, and evaluation. A formal process involves manager and employee training, support from the highest levels, and the application of specific measures to increase employee participation. These can include: quality circles, self-directed/self-managed work teams, gainsharing programs, employee ownership, problem solving teams, and cross-functional task-forces (to name a few!).

Additional Resources

Below is a list of articles we’ve written that provide specific strategies for building employee involvement. Look for future blogs to dive deeper into these separate, yet vital, tools of employee involvement.

– Robert Bullock

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Quality Glossary Definition: Employee empowerment

Employee empowerment is defined as the ways in which organizations provide their employees with a certain degree of autonomy and control in their day-to-day activities. This can include having a voice in process improvement, helping to create and manage new systems and tactics, and running smaller departments with less oversight from higher-level management.

A key principle of employee empowerment is providing employees the means for making important decisions and helping ensure those decisions are correct. When deployed properly, this should result in heightened productivity and a better quality of employee work and work life.

How Does Employee Empowerment Work?

Employee empowerment varies based on an organization's culture and work design. However, empowerment is based on the concepts of job enlargement and job enrichment. Job enlargement differs from job enrichment in that job enlargement is horizontal expansion and job enrichment is considered vertical.

• Job enlargement: Changing the scope of the job to include a greater portion of the horizontal process.
  • Example: A bank teller not only handles deposits and disbursement, but also distributes traveler's checks and sells certificates of deposit.
• Job enrichment: Increasing the depth of the job to include responsibilities that have traditionally been carried out at higher levels of the organization.
  • Example: The teller also has the authority to help a client fill out a loan application, and to determine whether or not to approve the loan.

As these examples show, employee empowerment requires:

• Training in the skills necessary to carry out the additional responsibilities
• Access to information on which decisions can be made
• Initiative and confidence on the part of the employee to take on greater responsibility

Employee empowerment also means giving up some of the power traditionally held by management, which means managers also must take on new roles, knowledge, and responsibilities. However, this does not mean that management relinquishes all authority, delegates all decision-making, and allows operations to run without accountability. It requires a significant investment of time and effort, especially from management, to develop mutual trust, assess and add to individuals' capabilities, and develop clear agreements about roles, responsibilities, risk taking, and boundaries.

What Does an Empowered Organizational Structure Look Like?

Employee empowerment often also calls for restructuring the organization to reduce levels of the hierarchy or to provide a more customer- and process-focused organization.

Employee empowerment is often viewed as an inverted triangle of organizational power. In the traditional view, management is at the top while customers are on the bottom; in an empowered environment, customers are at the top while management is in a support role at the bottom.

Employee Empowerment resources

Driving Higher Workplace Performance: Using Analytics, Dashboard Metrics, and Soft Skills to Improve Results When assigned the task of improving warehouse performance for a Western Canadian industrial distribution center, a lean Six Sigma Black Belt discovered the differences between "human" and "automated" business processes.

Get Staff Involved in Quality Initiatives (Quality Progress) By challenging employees to solve quality problems, a company saved more than $3.5 million the first year.

If You Give Your Employees a Voice, Do You Listen? (Journal for Quality and Participation) Making it easy for your employees to share their feedback is the first step. Being willing to respond quickly to their input builds commitment.

Empowerment in Total Quality: Designing and Implementing Effective Employee Decision-Making Strategies (Quality Management Journal) This paper provides a conceptual definition of empowerment and offers an implementation strategy for total quality management managers.

Adapted from The Certified Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence Handbook, ASQ Quality Press.