Incorporating employee ideas pays back twice. First, the idea itself often is a good one. Second and equally powerful, because the idea comes from the employees themselves, it is much more likely that they will be committed to its execution. Welcoming employee opinions also produces greater feelings of inclusion among workers. When the 12 elements are compared against a number of statements testing perceived racial or gender bias, the “opinions count” statement is most highly correlated with feelings that employees are always treated with respect, that the company treats its workforce fairly.

More than a century after Taylor and Noll met, and less than 200 miles away, two professors took on the same problem of how to best increase productivity. Derek Jones and Takao Kato went to a small manufacturing facility in central New York to investigate whether inviting employees to share their opinions about process improvements created the hoped-for benefits.

The real name of the company was not revealed. In their paper, Jones and Kato called it “PARTS.” PARTS was a subsidiary of a multi-national company. It made a range of small components used by large manufacturers. Its customers demanded high quality, so the 134 machine operators it employed had to be careful to not deviate from design specifications. Pieces outside those tolerances were rejected.

The parallels to the problems Taylor sought to solve are intriguing. Like Taylor, Jones and Kato were studying a manufacturing environment. Like Taylor in his experiments with lathes and metal, the professors were investigating how man and machine (or woman and machine; 62% of PARTS operators were female) can combine for maximum production. Like Taylor, Jones and Kato were studying the productivity of low-wage workers. Only one-third of PARTS operators had education beyond high school, and virtually none had a four-year college degree. The average wage was $7.64 an hour.

Beyond the advances in technology during the century that separates them, the major difference between the studies is that while Taylor wanted a mindless compliance with management’s thinking, PARTS executives were inviting workers to strategize on the best ways to improve the work with which they were so familiar. For example, the 400-square-foot shipping area “was originally quite disorganized, and access to the shipping area was cumbersome at best,” wrote Jones and Kato. “A team reorganized this shipping area and thereby created additional free space equaling 175 square feet. In turn, this allowed workers at all stations to access the shipping area quickly and smoothly.”

Operators developed a new labeling system for spare parts, reducing both the time needed for labeling and defects caused by using wrong parts. Employees developed a better exhaust system for the wire soldering station, revised manuals, and rearranged machine locations for better efficiency.

PARTS provided a good environment for studying employee input because at the time of the research, only some of the employees were eligible to participate in the new operator-input “team” program. The professors interviewed 90% of the operators face-to-face and were able to compare the comments of those who were in and out of the initiative. “Relative to non-team members, team participants consider themselves to be more empowered, sensed that more information was being shared by management, communicated more often with managers and supervisors within their work groups or teams, and communicated more often with workers outside of their work groups or teams,” wrote the researchers.

“In addition, the survey findings indicate that participants in teams put more effort into their work. The evidence is equally suggestive that attitudes and thus potentially the behavior of team members was being affected in other ways. Thus we find some evidence for participants displaying stronger organizational commitment and more trust towards management. . . . Team members are more satisfied with their jobs (and) are more positive about the use and contributions of their knowledge and skills.”

The New York manufacturer was also a good site for research because the company keeps individual statistics on each operator’s production, defect rate, and downtime. Employees in the “team” program averaged 3% higher production and 27% fewer defects. While the company had to invest additional time to gather input, the results bolster the case that “employee involvement will produce improved enterprise performance through diverse channels, including enhanced discretionary effort by employees.”

Somewhere beyond the grave, Henry Noll is smiling.

Copyright Ó 2007 The Gallup Organization, Princeton, NJ.  All rights reserved.  Reprinted with permission.  Visit The Gallup Management Journal at http://gmj.gallup.com/

Article from The Gallup Management Journal