Staff involvement
Involving people in decisions that affect not only their working lives but the services and products they deliver can have many business benefits.

When an organisation needs to improve performance by making changes to the way it does things, it is often the management who devise and agree the new procedures and then ask people to implement them. However, unless there is good communication of the reasons for the new system, there is no guarantee that staff will fully commit to instigating new ways of working. This can mean that the changes have little or no impact.

A more effective way of ensuring staff ‘buy-in’ to new ways of working is to involve them in developing solutions to problems. More often than not, the best people to comment on how to improve performance are the people who carry out the task. By involving staff in the development of new processes and procedures, they may come up with suggestions and ideas that management did not think about, simply because they weren’t doing the job day-to-day.

Involving staff in business development doesn’t just mean asking what they think. It should be a more involving and engaging process whereby people are presented with the business case or need for change, along with any constraints. Staff should then be allowed time for thought, and then discussion and debate amongst themselves as well as with management. Management should listen carefully to ideas and where they feel unable to implement suggestions provide acknowledgement of staff input and feed back as to why.

This process of involvement can have many benefits, including:

• Improved decision making processes and outcomes
• Increased ‘buy-in’ from staff to new ways of working
• Improved efficiency
• Better recruitment and retention
• Greater staff satisfaction
• Better delivery of products and services and therefore improved customer satisfaction
• Increased commitment to the goals of the organisation.