How do employees participate in designing their work?

Acceptance-based social innovations in the world of work (e.g. in the areas of work organisation, competence development, and management) are hardly imaginable without participatory, inclusive, and empowering processes. These are becoming increasingly important in society and in the workplace.

At the societal level, one question is how civil society can be actively involved in dealing with major issues of the future (e.g. how can and should digitalisation be shaped?) Closely related to this are questions about the required labour and social policy options to achieve maximum social benefit.

With the opening up of enterprise boundaries in innovation processes (open innovation; co‑creation), a broad spectrum of new social practices for involving different stakeholders has emerged (lead user method, crowdsourcing and innovation competitions, living labs, real experiments).

The Social Research Center Dortmund is active in both fields. A good overview of the concepts involved can be found in the following congress volume „Innovations for Society – New Ways and Methods for Unfolding the Potential of Social Innovations“.

At the company level, the debate is currently dominated by the design of digital technologies. In the debate about Work 4.0, employee orientation is considered a key success factor. This is not just about the introduction and optimisation of digital technologies through employee involvement, but above all about employees influencing the design of their work to promote “good” or “decent” human-oriented work, through participatory approaches.

An example of participatory approach can be found here