EMPLOYEE-DRIVEN INNOVATION
What do employees know? Are they merely means to achieve organisational goals, or can they actually contribute in more ways? During the early Taylorism era, the answer you would hear most often would probably be: employees do, company owners think and delegate. However, in the contemporary society, our view has changed: employees have a voice and are actively involved in all kinds of tasks and decision making. Innovation however, is still seen as something that should be done by people whose job description clearly tells them to – most often people in R&D departments.
But could shop-level employees also contribute to innovation? After all, they stand directly in contact with the organisation’s customers and clients, and often have to solve problems by using their discretion. So if we assume that shop-level employees could contribute to innovation, how would you stimulate that, which skills and knowledge would they need to do so, and how do their innovative ideas transform from creative ideas into actually implemented solutions? Those questions describe what we term ‘employee-driven innovation’: the creation and implementation of new or improved organisational processes and products by employees who do not have the task to be innovative.
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HRM IN SMART INDUSTRIES
Driven by ongoing technological advancements and far-reaching digitization, industrial structures are changing. More specifically, Smart Industry, also called Industry 4.0, are not a future perspective but it is happening right now. It is built on a combination of three pillars: use of production technology, digitization, and a network approach. The aim of smart industries is to become more competitive through faster and better adoption of what the information technologies have to offer.
The effects surrounding Smart Industries, digitalization extends the impact towards monitoring consumer behaviors, Big Data interferes in monitoring and steering the work processes and job tasks with high level of preciseness and globalization turns offshoring to reshoring, results in a shift of employment relations from High Performance Work Practices (known as HPWPs) towards High-Resolution HR Practices. Usual tasks of managers and HR professionals, like managing knowledge – skills – abilities of employees, get a new dimension in times of Smart Industries, sometimes called “Do – It – Yourself” management.
This PhD project joins the initiative on Smart Industries from the Human Resource Management point of view. It aims to conceptualize and explore new HR practices to support the progress of Smart Industries as well as examine characteristics of Human Capital (knowledge, skills and attitudes) that best influence the performance of Smart Industries.
HRM in the Digital ‘Gig’ Economy
Although online labor platforms (such as Deliveroo, Uber and Helping) do not formally employ so-called ‘gig workers’, they are nevertheless dependent on their ongoing commitment, engagement and performance. The research project on HRM and gig work examines the antecedents and outcomes of the uptake and execution of HRM activities by and for multiple actors, including gig workers, consumers, online labor platforms and society.
Robotization of Human Touch: The Relationship between Line Managers and Employees in a Digitalized Environment
The media hype around robotization may change, alter or even replace human interactions, creating implications for employees. For organizations it is crucial to understand the consequences of robotization for human interactions and the conditions required to ensure that these altered interactions are successful. Therefore, this project has two aims: (1) to explore the ways in which robotization affects the relationship between employees and their line managers and (2) the conditions necessary to maintain successful relations between employees and line managers.