by Money isn’t everything when it comes to keeping employees happy. While compensation is an important factor contributing to overall job satisfaction, other criteria matter more, according to a CareerBliss.com study reported by “Forbes” writer Meghan Casserly. Control over daily tasks is one of the most important work characteristics for producing happiness on the job. High involvement work teams improve productivity and happiness by giving workers more autonomy and encouraging cooperative work efforts.
High Involvement Management Practices (HIMPs) are policies and procedures that seek to increase employee involvement in management decision making, and to equip employees with the skills and autonomy to identify improvements in firm processes.
The aim of encouraging such involvement is to increase employee job satisfaction and effort, encourage employee investment in their own productivity and improve commitment. If successful, HIMPs could increase productivity and wages, and reduce turnover, building further firm specific human capital. This increased job stability may allow employees to build further firm specific knowledge and make employers more willing to invest in training and internal promotion, thus increasing progression.
HIMPs also typically involve providing employees with management information and implementing procedures to improve information flows from workers to management. It is hoped that this will increase innovation within the firm, encourage job autonomy and increase the likelihood of workers being ‘noticed’ for potential career progression.
Highly Skilled Workers
For high involvement teams to work, workers need to be knowledgeable in their fields. High involvement work teams are most common at organizations who recruit well-educated, accomplished individuals for all positions. Giving these workers autonomy is the best way to keep them happy and get the most out of your talent pool. Although a team’s success depends on the strategies used, coming up with effective strategies depends on people who are creative and hard-working in the first place.
Autonomy
Some companies operate with a top-down approach. A manager tells lower-level employees what to do, outlines sub-tasks, defines deadlines and assigns responsibilities. High involvement work teams are less hierarchical, giving everyone more freedom to decide the specifics of approaching a larger project. A manager provides an overview of what needs to get done then it’s up to the team to collectively decide who does what and how individual tasks will be handled. The most mundane tasks aren’t passed to lower-level employees. Everyone handles a variety of different responsibilities, which prevents boredom and disillusionment.
Focus on Learning
High performance work teams are focused on learning and continuous improvement. The team’s mandate isn’t just to get a job done, but to use competitive intelligence, market information and internal statistics to find better ways to do things. To make high performance work teams their most effective, managers need to focus on employee continuing education and career development, too. Sending people to conferences and footing part of the bill for education upgrades produces a workforce equipped to think outside of the box.
Flexibility, Efficiency and Productivity
Although high involvement work teams do increase workplace satisfaction, the reason why most companies choose this structure is because it gets results that drive a healthy bottom line. When team members feel comfortable taking on a number of different responsibilities, the organization is more flexible to react quickly to changes in demand or market conditions. According to an article published in “Quality Insider” magazine, introducing high involvement work teams helped Johnson & Johnson reduce inventory by $6 million. 3M increased production gains by 300 percent at one of its facilities.
There are three other organizational resources that need to be decentralized in order for employees to have the capacity to create high performance organizations:
- Knowledge that enables employees to understand and contribute to organizational performance. Knowledge includes both technical knowledge to do the job or provide the service; business knowledge for managing the organization; and interpersonal, problem-solving and decision skills for working together as a team.
- Information about the performance of the organization. Such information includes data related to production (revenues, costs, sales, profits, cost structure); customer satisfaction; and benchmarks with other companies.
- Rewards for high performance, including adjusting the compensation structure to be aligned with the behaviors, outcomes, and capabilities required for high performance. Employees may be paid on the basis of the knowledge and skills needed in the work environment to get the job done. There also may be performance-based pay that is allocated on a group or team basis and may include, for instance, profit sharing, gain sharing or group-based salary bonuses.
