EXPERIMENTS FROM SEVERAL HUNDRED TRIALS

AN INTRODUCTION

In the past 4-5 years almost every major Swedish industrial enterprise has tried out new work forms and routines for joint collaboration in some phase of their activities.

The new procedures have comprised the following:

Increased emphasis on the objective of enhanced job satisfaction;

Employees at a work site are given an opportunity, through the agency of various collaborative committees, to make their voices heard and to influence the design of their work;

Work roles in production are being expanded and group efforts

are being strived for to a greater extent than hitherto;

The piece rate system is being replaced by new wage fornis, usually entailing group incentive wages;

The technical production apparatus and the physical environment are being developed through e. g. the addition of completely new and different factories.

The driving forces behind these developments are:

Difficulties in recruiting staff for production work;

Demands for co-determination and industrial democracy;

Ideas from behavioural scientists on autonomous groups;

2

Efforts to increase efficiency;

Many reports have been published on developments in individual companies. This report will instead describe general results obtained from these developments, the difficulties often encountered and the positive features reported by many. The report is based on contacts made with several hundred companies.

The terms "successful" and "unsuccessful" approaches are used in the report. In our view, a successful approach should have the following features:

The new approaches should lead to real changes in production work;

Management and the local union branch should regard results as successful and be prepared to continue;

Spontaneous interest and spontaneous spread to other parts of the company;

Efficiency trends at least comparable to those attainable with conventional models.

COLLABORATION IN THE CONFERENCE ROOM

3

In recent years thousands of collaborative committees have been formed in Swedish companies. This has been in an effort to enhance co-determination and to achieve better solutions through greater utilization of existing know-how.

The work in these collaborative committeės takes place in the conference room or the equivalent, involve part of the work force and is carried out during a rather limited proportion of working hours, such as a few hours every other week. The experience gained in these collaborative processes will be described first.

Results have varied from company to company. Some have been successful and others have obviously been failures.

How to fail at joint consultation

Some of the following features are found in companies which have gone "astray" in their approach to enhanced co-determination:

The expanded collaboration is described under headings such

as "enhanced co-determination", "enhanced industrial democracy", "work site democracy" or "socio-techniques", i.e. in terms borrowed from politics or behavioural science and uncommon in everyday life.

The development process has a start in a written programme in which problem analysis, target descriptions and suggestions of solutions are described with sweeping eloquence and with an abundance of words borrowed from foreign languages (mainly English).

The development of a personnel policy programme is often one
point on the list.

44-725 O-75-17

The entire programme of collaboration reports to the

works council and operates as an organization collateral

to the work organization. The work organization works and the collaborative organization collaborates.

The different components in the collaborative system are described in frequently imposing organization charts and diagrams. There are often a large number of collaborative committees in the system. There are committees for different subjects, different departments and different work sites.

Rules for the manner in wich collaboration is to be conducted have been drawn up centrally and adopted by the works council. The rules specify the frequency of meetings, the agenda, routines for writing the minutes and the dissemination of information by a collaborative committee.

The entire collaborative system has been developed relatively quickly by virtue of a decision in the works council on the desirable scope of the system and the pace with which the different collaborative committees should be established.

Most of the programme in a collaborative system of this kind consists of continous collaborative procedures in conference

rooms.

Discussion at meetings are mainly devoted to short-comings in the work environment and measures to increase job enjoyment. Trivial matters predominate, and the entire procedure resembles a gigantic system of "wailing walls". Attitudes towards collabo ration tend to become negative, and job satisfaction declines. However, this effect is limited by the fact that only part of the work force participates in collaborative programmes and collaboration comprises less than two percent of the work time of these employees. Contributions by collaborative committees