How to Achieve Total Employee Involvement

You may deduce what Total Employee Involvement is, but why should you achieve this for your business?  Continue reading for our conclusions, but let’s review the history.

The collaboration required to achieve Total Employee Involvement takes us back to theories of why humans evolved to dominate the planet.  Do I have your attention now?   Simply put, Total Employee Involvement is achieved through collaboration and cooperation.  Whether demonstrated by situations of hunting, foraging, child-rearing, or migrating, humans with culture, in pursuit of shared goals, had much to gain through cooperation.  Cooperating with humans would lead to greater survival, reproduction, and colonization.  For your business, this cooperation leads to greater survival, production, efficiency, and the establishment of sustainable controls.

Consider Elon Musk’s collaborative ideas with Tesla’s open-source patents, onboard real-time bug reporting, and the synergies between Tesla and SpaceX.  The open-source patent, shows how Elon understands true competitive advantage comes through the rate of innovation, not the number of patents you possess.  He believes the real way you protect intellectual property is by innovating fast enough.  How does he intend to keep innovating?  He does entice some of the smartest people to work for him, and may want you to be “hard-core”, but he also demands collaboration and the sharing of ideas.

Therefore, one of the goals of management should be creating challenges that require interdependence among employees.

How does Marcus Paint involve its employee?

At Marcus Paint, one of our five core values is “Empower Others”.  We understand that all our programs and critical processes, whether safety, quality, 5S, R&D, Production, or others, need collaboration to be successful.  Below are some examples of the Marcus Way:

1. ALL employees onsite participate in our weekly 5S/Safety Inspections.
2. People and areas are specifically scheduled so that we have different eyes on all areas of the facility regularly.  We strongly encourage questions and ideas, and all these inspections are reviewed weekly by our Safety Manager.  Don’t worry, every week just means every area… each employee only spends about 15-30 minutes on this every couple of months.
3. Providing additional safety awareness training programs to employees may not even be required.  (E.g. HazCom training for our Customer Service Employees) 
4. We want to provide all our employees with better insight into what it takes to get the best quality coating out the door in a safe manner, and we spend time tailoring these safety training to be specific to Marcus Paint so that we encourage even more questions and ideas. 
5. Safety Team is not static
6. We can rotate different members to keep high-level ideas and goals fresh and continue our empowerment of everyone.
7. Allow and encourage work instruction creation by the individual(s) who perform the work, the experts! 
8. We provide the time and training to have all our employees help create work instructions for the things we do.  They can either start a draft themselves or are heavily involved as engineers or others create these documents.

The Benefits of Total Employee Involvement

1. Higher Retention and Morale
2. Higher Motivation and Engagement
3. Enhanced Talent Development
4. Easier Change Management
5. Focus on Results

Everyone rightfully feels a part of Team Marcus because they are, and they matter a great deal to our success!

References: 

https://uxdesign.cc/the-power-of-collaboration-79513139349b

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/668207