High Performance Workplaces
The Role of Employee Involvement in a Modern Economy

Mac Mackay - Managing Partner: dawlaw

So what can we do about employee involvement to improve our firm's performance?

The Chartered Management Institute strongly supports increased employee involvement and seeks to encourage organisations to develop the genuine employee involvement that forms the basis of all high performance work environments.

Summary: key recommendations 

Partners should heed the following messages: 

• put sufficient resources into developing and training managers to become effective people managers rather than just task managers
• provide experience of effective employee involvement, perhaps by visiting other organisations
• use employee involvement practices that create real change rather than “bolting something on”. Job enrichment and self-managing teams are the most effective.
• show clear, unambiguous commitment to employee involvement from the top of the firm
• adapt performance management systems to the goals of employee involvement. To ensure that senior managers have a true picture of the level of employee involvement, they should set up systems for monitoring levels of involvement. Employee attitude surveys can be very effective here. (Ask dawlaw about best practice!)
• use clear, frequent and effective two-way communication.
• use the new legislation to clarify the current legal framework
• ensure that any new administrative requirements are kept to a minimum
• protect the current level of employee involvement, particularly informal methods, by not prescribing rigid formal processes.
• enable flexibility by setting minimum requirements and supporting these by voluntary codes of practice and effective dissemination of best practice and provide sources of evidence of effective employee involvement.

So, while management training might not be mandatory for you – beyond Management Course Stage One – the way we do it at ‘dawlaw’ is a dynamic way for you to start to build the hardest of skills – the soft skills – as a manager of lawyers.

So, want to survive and prosper? Improve the engagement of your people...
Talk to us.

Mac Mackay
Management Tutor

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