Process for Employee Participation

Employee participation is hugely important for business success. Success of the business requires that each employee work toward the greater good of the organization. One of the ways in which a business can help employees make a solid contribution is to develop formal processes that help foster increased participation, exposure, and accountability. Some strong ideas are as follows:

1.) Product Teams: Product teams should be designed to ponder improvements for any product or service. Improvements to products or services should not be conducted in a vacuum. Such improvement requires the input of marketing, customer services, operations, sales, and workers. In other words, simply improving a product that doesn't increase its marketability or can't profitably be produced doesn't make sense. Without various input from multiple stakeholders the product might be a "flop".

2.) Recognition Programs: Recognition programs should be designed to recognize exceptional work throughout the organization. It is not enough for a person to receive a thank you while some people in the organization are receiving much more. Strong employees that are an example to others should receive formal recognition. This formal recognition helps them feel proud of their accomplishments and sends a signal to others to follow their example.

3.) Formal Idea Submission: Great ideas for improvement to the organization should not be ignored even if they are coming from the most entry level employees. However, such programs should be given a formal structure and a formal review process. Simply ignoring these suggestions means you are not tapping your employees potential and knowledge. Thus submissions should be placed in a formal format, include documentation, a formal review, and a reward process. Such improvements could even be recorded and catalogued.

4.) Promoting From Within: Some companies hire all of their managers from outside of the organization. However, when this happens employees begin to believe they have no future outside of their current job within this organization. Therefore, it is necessary to occasionally promote and train exceptional employees to further the knowledge but also to send a positive impression that good work will be rewarded.

5.) Management Relationship Training: Something as subtle as poor management skills can change the dynamics by which people work. A bully in the workplace is likely to only receive compliance and workers aren't going to share their great ideas for fear of chastisement or rejection. In addition, poor managers also do not produce any loyalty to the company and this can further problems with retention of strong talent.