Packages of Participation: Swedish Employees’ Experience of Lean Depends on How They Are Involved

Abstract

OCCUPATIONAL APPLICATIONS The results presented here show that active and continuous employee participation in organizational change programs, e.g., the implementation of Lean, can have several positive employee effects. However, the benefit of participation may depend on “what is inside the package,” which is important for practitioners to know as they decide both whether and how to involve workers in implementing Lean. Structured and continuous “packages” of participation, such as improvement groups, may provide the most positive employee experience, whereas temporary packages, such as intermittent change projects, may provide the least positive. Packages combining both continuous and temporary participation may even diminish some of the positive effects of continuous participation, while also possibly being the most costly approach. Just as Lean interventions strive to maximize value and minimize waste, so must organizations planning organizational change identify the participatory approaches that will yield the highest value without excess waste. TECHNICAL ABSTRACT Background: Lean production is a dominant approach in Swedish and global manufacturing and service industries. Studies of Lean's employee effects are few and contradictory. Purpose: Employee effects from Lean are likely not uniform. This article investigates the effect of employees’ participation on their experiences of Lean. Method: This study investigated how different packages of employee participation in Lean affected manufacturing workers’ experiences of Lean. During 2008–2011, qualitative and quantitative data were collected from Swedish manufacturing companies participating in the national Swedish Lean production program Produktionslyftet. Data from 129 surveys (28 companies), 39 semi-structured interviews, and 30 reports were analyzed. In the main analysis, comparisons were made of the survey-reported Lean experiences of employees in three groups: temporary group employees (N = 36), who participated in Lean mostly through intermittent projects; continuous group employees (N = 69), who participated through standing improvement groups; and combined group employees (N = 24), who participated in both ways. Results: Continuous group employees had the most positive experience of Lean, followed by the combined group. Temporary group employees had the least positive experiences, being less likely than their counterparts to report that Lean improved teamwork; occupational safety; and change-related learning, decision making, and authority. Conclusions: These findings support the importance of continuous, structured opportunities for participation but raise the possibility that more participation may result in greater workload and role overload, mitigating some benefits of employee involvement. Consequently, companies should consider involving employees in change efforts but should attend to the specific design of participation activities.