Worker participation boosts business

A lot is written about increasing worker dialogue and participation as a way to improve labour conditions. This is usually as a way of ensuring workers' voices and concerns are heard and addressed. What is not normally mentioned is how management also need to have their concerns heard and addressed if the business is to succeed and continue providing jobs.

Forms of workers' participation that have grown up around the ethical trade sphere can seem frightening to businesses that fear disruption and militancy. However twentieth century quality management techniques may hold the answer to increased dialogue and productivity.

Quality circles - groups of workers and managers from a particular business section coming together to solve their departments' issues - were all the rage in the 1990s at UK production sites, who caught the bug from Japanese quality management theories. I saw this work amazingly well in a Scottish Knitwear plant I was working in at the time, where the knitters went on to win a national quality prize for the way they had reduced downtime and worked together with managers and suppliers to achieve this. What was even more amazing was that these workers were not naïve graduates straight out of college but hard-bitten workers who had been employed for years but never asked to participate; yet they held the answers to the company's production issues in their heads and hands.

I saw the same approach work just as well with another seemingly unlikely group of people a few years ago in Sri Lanka. Following the 2004 Asian Tsunami I worked with several communities to rebuild their homes and businesses. While most redevelopment programmes worked with building contractors we worked with the communities, directly giving them responsibility for managing the rebuilding of their homes. Unskilled rural community leaders and young people learnt about critical path management and raw material receipt and issuing. They managed this better than some of the building contractors, completing their rebuilds on-time and on-budget.

What both scenarios highlight is that the profit potential for most organisations lies at the bottom of the organisational pyramid. The people who do the work best understand the challenges involved and also generally hold the solutions.

Trying to establish worker dialogue at a time of labour disruption, which is how some companies start, is bound to be fraught with issues as feelings will already be running high.

However if management share production and productivity concerns on an on-going basis with the opportunity for workers to respond, there will be a much firmer footing for dialogue should any labour disputes arise. There is also the possibility that along the way you solve production issues, increase profitability and worker satisfaction, retain skills and build a more secure future for your organisation.

Starting to build worker dialogue when there are concerns about conditions is bound to fail. Start building common ground on less emotive topics such as production issues; help the workers solve their own work-based concerns and you build a working relationship that can support the future growth of the business, jobs and improved working conditions.

This piece first appeared on ethicalexpert.com