Employee Participation

Employee Participation

Empowering employees for innovation and productivity

Mainio Tech is helping large organizations in empowering their employees with customized digital platforms for effective brainstorming and organisational participation.

The challenge of utilizing employee innovation in a large organizations

Large organizations in both the private and public sector – such as the cities of Helsinki and Hämeenlinna in Finland – can have a significant number of employees, with Helsinki alone having about 40,000 people in the staff.

there is a lot of potential among the personnel

This means that there is a lot of potential among the personnel in the form of new ideas and initiatives that could benefit the organizations in many ways. The challenge is, however, that in large-scale organizations information does not always flow effectively from the employee level all the way up to the decision-makers.

Digital platforms for empowering employees

Mainio Tech has stepped in to help large organizations in empowering employee participation. We design and implement effective, easy-to-use digital platforms that are open to all employees, for brainstorming, decision-making and communication, to name a few potential applications.

The new employee platforms used by Helsinki and Hämeenlinna are based on the Decidim open-source platform. We customized the platforms according to the specific needs of both organisations, which meant, for example:

  • designing the systems to work for these use cases
  • customizing the modules, such as brainstorming and discussions
  • integrating the systems to the organizational single sign-on solutions

– all based on the organizations’ requirements.

Making the employees’ voices heard – and more

The new digital platforms serve in giving a voice to employees in many ways, benefiting not only the staff but the whole organization – and helping the management to be better understand what kind of valuable assets they have among their employees.

helping the management to be better understand what kind of valuable assets they have

The platforms help in collecting information and ideas, and in encouraging employees to take initiative in new ways. They also serve in further evaluating and discussing the ideas, and putting the best ones into use.

Furthermore, the new platforms are scalable and customizable for any kind of participation: they can be utilized for collective budgeting, surveys, idea competitions with prizes, organizational development – and much more.

Ideas in effective use

Mainio Tech’s new digital participation platforms are already in use in Finnish large-scale organizations such as the cities of Helsinki and Hämeenlinna. Here are a few already-implemented ideas sourced via our platforms:

  • City planning: thanks to an employee iniative, all construction sites are now equipped with informative signs on the site that tell people what is being built and on what kind of schedule. Previously these signs did not exist on all construction sites.
  • Maintenance: a city employee noticed that the ventilation systems on local trains were on all of the time – even when not necessary. Thanks to the employee’s idea, the ventilation systems were equipped with timers, making them more effective and saving money and energy.
  • Social services: a city employee came up with the idea of physically merging the offices of the City Social Service Point and Kela (The Social Insurance Institution of Finland), and bringing the staff to work under the same roof, as they are constantly exchanging information anyway. This also makes it easier for people to utilize these services.