Thomas Carey is co-Principal Catalyst for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada and Executive-in-Residence with the British Columbia Association of Institutes and Universities and the Monash University Faculty of Arts .
Anahita Baregheh is an Associate Professor at Nipissing University’s School of Business and Research Director for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada.
Marsha O’Connor is Chair of the North Bay chapter of the Human Resources Professional Association and an instructor in the Graduate Certificate in HR Management at Canadore College. Marsha is a Certified Human Resources Leader with many years of HR leadership in the North Bay region.
For many organizations, employee-led innovation has become a key element in responding to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. In preparation for our life “beyond lockdown”, an initiative led by Workplace Innovation Europe is supporting workplaces who want to build on this momentum for employee-driven innovation, as a key organizational strategy for thriving post-COVID. In European research, Employee-Led Workplace Innovation has been shown to improve organizational performance and quality of work for employees, with a strong evidence base emerging on how to achieve these complementary goals[i].
We see an opportunity within Canada to collaborate with our European colleagues in leveraging this momentum of employee-led innovation during the pandemic crisis as a key contributing factor in thriving post-COVID. The opportunity we have identified focuses on three elements:
supporting organizations in regional centres (beyond Canada’s major urban areas) in fostering employee-led workplace innovation,
through collaborating across innovation project leaders, Human Resource Management professionals and researchers in workplace innovation, and
· enabling Small and Medium-sized Enterprises to mobilize knowledge from research at the intersection of Workplace Innovation and Human Resource Management.
The key roles of HR Management professionals in fostering employee-led workplace innovation has been recognized by their professional associations. For example, within the U.K.’s Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, work on this theme has included:
a four-part research series on innovation and HR's role in helping innovation flourish
an analysis of how HR Management needs to think creatively to adapts its ways of working to support the new organizational priorities for workplace innovation
inclusion of capability to support innovation amongst the Core Behaviours curriculum for HR Management professionals
As both the content and process of HR Management are recognized to be important drivers of employees’ innovative behaviour, researchers in the field of Workplace Innovation have begun to analyze how the positive relationship between HRM and employees’ innovative behaviour can be understood and enhanced. It is this knowledge base which we want to curate and contextualize for use by workplace partners. We’ve sketched out sample results from this research base in the three research excerpts below.
How Can HR Management in SMEs Foster Employee-Led Workplace Innovation?
An Australian research group has been studying how Small and Medium-sized Enterprises can make their size into an advantage in fostering employee-led workplace innovation [1]:
“Small and Medium-size Enterprises have fewer means to retain employees than their larger competitors, because large organizations can usually offer higher remuneration and more promising career prospects. In addition, small firms organize human resources in different and often informal ways”.
However, “SMEs can provide greater opportunities for employees to become acquainted with each other, share knowledge across work units, and learn collaboratively, because of their smaller number of employees. Such forms of informal learning are typically inexpensive and can promote innovative behaviour among employees.”
(We’re also looking forward to analyzing later research by this same group on the relationship between performance-based incentives and employee innovation behaviours [2], another area where we have noted significant interest from both the HR Management community and workplace innovation researchers.)
A European research group reported insights from an in-depth case study of a Dutch SME [3]:
Our case study examined a Dutch technical company that provides innovative customer solutions in factory automation. We wanted to study which HRM practices are important to foster innovation and which HRM practices should receive more attention to achieve this company’s innovation ambitions.
The results showed that the company’s HRM policies and practices supported most areas of employee competency, motivation and opportunity for workplace innovation. The major area identified for improvement was in interdepartmental teamwork based on team targets instead of individual tasks; potential improvements here include more facilitated interactions between teams, less focus on quantitative performance standards, more flexible organizational procedures and more employee autonomy.
How Can HR Management Teams Exemplify Employee-Led Workplace Innovation?
Finally, in both our higher ed and workplace contexts, we have been emphasizing that units charged with fostering workplace innovation capability can (must?) themselves be exemplars of employee-led innovation. We have identified several research groups with promising work on the nature of workplace innovation within HR management teams, and the factors that will promote improvements in both the quantity and quality of innovative work behaviour by HR teams.
For example, another research group has been examining the team characteristics which will lead to enhanced intrapreneurial activity among HR Management professionals in the Advanced Manufacturing sector [4]. Their findings indicate that intrapreneurial HR professionals display the behavioural characteristics of innovativeness, operationally pro-activeness, risk management and consensus-building in their efforts to add value to their organizations. The researchers noted that the prominence of the consensus-building dimension demonstrates the distinctiveness of intrapreneurship in the HR functional context.
[1] Sanders, K., & Lin, C. H. (2016). Human resource management and innovative behaviour: considering interactive, informal learning activities. In Human resource management, innovation and performance (pp. 32-47). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
[2] Sanders, K., Jorgensen, F., Shipton, H., Van Rossenberg, Y., Cunha, R., Li, X., ... & Dysvik, A. (2018). Performance‐based rewards and innovative behaviors. Human Resource Management, 57(6), 1455-1468.
[3] Nientied, P., & SlobWinterink, C. (2018). The Role of HRM In Fostering Innovation: A Case Study of a Dutch Technical Company. Dynamic Relations Management Journal, 7(2), 13-24.
[4] Amarakoon, U., Weerawardena, J., & Verreynne, M. L. (2018). Learning capabilities, human resource management innovation and competitive advantage. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 29(10), 1736-1766.