Thomas Carey
In our current research project to advance innovation in Canadian workforce, we are exploring how we can adapt research insights and exemplary practices (from Canada and beyond) to create more value from employee-led workplace innovation. The impact sought by our workplace partners across Canada includes both improvements in Quality of Work for employees and in performance on the organizational goals.
In this post, we will highlight three key collaboration processes between our project team and our workplace partners which enabled their mobilization of research into practice. We will then describe the Research-to-Practice Focus points selected by each workplace in that process, to direct our selection of research insights and exemplary practice for advancing the impact of their employee workplace innovation.
We will illustrate how our partners’ particular organizational contexts shaped our resulting Research-to-Practice Insights briefing for each workplace partner (or “are shaping”, since at this point some of these examples are still works-in-progress). You will then be invited to follow up with us about your organization’s specific RTP Focus points for workplace innovation and discuss how you could apply customized RTP Insights to address them.
Three Processes for Collaboration (between our project team and our workplace partners)
Identify a Research-to-Practice Focus for this project with each partner workplace: an innovation priority or “pain point” within their workplace where adapting insights from outside the organization could create the most impact on their innovation success.
For example, with one partner in the Healthcare sector, their focal point was to
Increase employee motivation to engage with inclusive workplace innovation.
With those context-specific issues as a Focus, our team curated the most promising global research insights and exemplary practices, and synthesized these results for the specific partner’s context in a concise Research-to-Practice Insights briefing.
In the example from Healthcare, the resulting RTP Recommendations addressed Factors that Influence Motivation for Workplace Innovation (you can see an excerpt from the Briefing notes here). We used research insights from a recent research study of workplace innovators in Canadian organizations to provide the organizing structure for systematic consideration of ways to enhance employee motivation.
After discussion of those results with our team, the partner can select the best value-for-effort adaptations of the Insights for their workplace. Together we then develop a Scenario (use case) to share more broadly for implementation within the organization.
Example Innovation Focus Points and Insights Explored with Workplace Partners
Sector: Healthcare
RTP Focus Point: Include more front-line employees in workplace innovation activities
RTP Insights: From a large recent body of research and exemplary practice, we are now curating and customizing a Briefing Note on “Engaging front-line employees in job crafting for quality of work and of care” for discussion and scenario building with this partner. (As a by-product of the process, we also found additional research insights to pass along, e.g., cultural differences affecting how immigrants to Canada view service tasks in the sector.)
Sector: Regional Centre for Technology and Innovation Development
RTP Focus Point: Integrate workplace innovation projects into organization processes
RTP Insights: This organization had taken a leading role in developing innovation capability with companies in their region. As a result, there were numerous possibilities to expand those programs (although not all fit into the organization’s mandate). One specific focus we are pursuing for insights to meet regional needs focuses on better integration of capability for Design Thinking with developments in other workplace innovation activities (e.g., Idea Management Systems, Innovation Adaption, and Intrapreneurship).
RTP Focus Point: Build organizational capability in evaluating innovation projects
RTP Insights: In this same region, some of the companies who had participated in past innovation programs had noted that the value created in some innovation projects lies in determining when – and why – an apparently promising idea should be removed from the company’s innovation agenda. They wanted to ensure that such projects were not seen as failures, by the company or the employees. We identified a body of research on multiple ways to improve the “assessment for improvement” and “performance evaluation” of innovation teams, for our research team to now explore with partner representatives.
Sector: Energy
RTP Focus Point: Enable project managers for innovation project leadership
RTP Insights: This sector is undergoing rapid change and is expecting a growth spurt in employee innovation projects. Project management staff have been incorporating Agile project management into their capabilities (as articulated in the Project Management Body of Knowledge v.7) and sector leaders are recognizing the need to do the same for Innovation project management (before its anticipated inclusion in PMBOK 8 or 9). Our team on this subproject includes a certified Project Management Professional and an expert in Innovation project management, to help us find the sweet spot in our Insights briefing.
Sector: Engineering Services
RTP Focus Point: Empower employees to “build the job you would like to be doing”
RTP Insights: Members of our research team had worked with company staff in the past and we had some familiarity with their innovation strategy. They were able to quickly list for us several areas where research insights and exemplary practices would have impact. The one on which we settled was strengthening the process of building innovation project teams. From the resulting Research-to-Practice Insights briefing, they chose to develop a scenario – now implemented – to encourage personal reflection on individual innovation strengths and apply the results in increasing diversity of perspectives in innovation teams.
Sector: Regional Workforce Development Centre
RTP Focus Point: Extend working lives of older employees by improving Quality of Work
RTP Insights: The COVID pandemic has accelerated the long-anticipated demographic challenges from older workers choosing to leave the workforce. We identified research studies from Europe and the U.S. where engagement of older workers in innovation projects had improved their Quality of Work life and encouraged longer working lives. The most promising initiatives included Job Crafting to adapt work roles to the strengths and needs of older workers and teamwork involving Intergenerational Knowledge Exchange.
Our partner organization noted that these developments also fit into organizational initiatives to improve Inclusion in the workforce, as there is evidence of older workers experiencing discrimination regarding innovation team membership. However, one insight from the research outside Canada highlighted that for the greatest impact this work of Inclusion may have to begin a significant time before older workers start to plan a retirement date (we could not find related research in Canada about this timing issue).
Another insight from the research is that inclusion of older workers on innovation teams requires some degree of maturity in the organizational capabilities for innovation, beyond an initial level of innovation strategy. With the possible exception of individual and team Job Crafting, inclusive workplace innovation is not a short-term fix for extending working lives. It can be, however, another potential benefit from systematic development of employee and organizational capability for innovation.
Sector: Corporate Career Training
RTP Focus Point: Leverage innovation for employee satisfaction & business opportunities
RTP Insights: Our team got an enthusiastic reception from an executive at company in the career training and corporate employee development sector. The company was proud of its reputation for agility and rapid response to changing jobs and career paths. There was potential for employee-led workplace innovation to extend those strengths while also building up the company’s status as an employer-of-choice and helping to develop new business opportunities. This interaction is also giving our research team an interesting opportunity to adapt some of our own award-winning innovation initiatives with higher education institutions into a new context.
Your Invitation…
Now that you’ve seen these examples, we’d like your help in expanding our collaborations:
If one of the Focus points listed above resonates for you, we’d like to work with you on a mini-version of the 2nd Collaboration process described above to sketch out a Research-to-Practice Briefing customized for your context. This will let us test how much of the research we’ve already curated can be repurposed for other workplaces…and what new insights or adaptation must be added to meet your needs as an organization.
If your organization needs Research-to-Practice insights about other Focus points in order to advance employee workplace innovation, we’d like to work with you on a mini-version of the 1st Collaboration process above to map out the available knowledge to address your needs and identify any gaps for further research initiatives.
Connect with us by emailing our Research Director or filling in a Connect form on this website.
Final note: We should also point out an example where we were not able to identify available research insights to address a workplace partner’s interests. A company in the Forestry sector which was relatively new to the process of systematic employee innovation wanted examples of leading-edge workplace innovation specific to that sector. We were surprised that we were unable to find suitable resources for this request, given the key role of workplace innovation in the Nordic countries where Forestry is also an important part of the economy. When we inquired with one of our research colleagues in Scandinavia, they acknowledged this gap and attributed it to the separation of their national Forestry labour organization from the traditional Nordic tri-lateral collaborations between government, employers and labour unions.
Acknowledgement: Our project on Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work Life is supported by the Government of Canada’s Future Skills program
About the author
Thomas Carey is co-Principal Catalyst (Academic Partnerships) with the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, and a former Professor and Associate Vice-President at the University of Waterloo.