Successfully starting and running a business also means, in most cases, successfully dealing with people. These can be the people who work within the company or those who interact with the company externally. These different groups of people are typically also called stakeholders. The most relevant stakeholders are most likely employees, customers, suppliers and creditors, as well as shareholders.
Involvement plays a central role in dealing with all stakeholders. Entrepreneurs should know their most important stakeholders and, optimally, also take an active approach to the involvement of these groups.
Involvement is equated with engagement in many companies and professional articles. If one takes a closer look and wants to focus more on the activities of the company, a separate consideration makes a little more sense. Involvement is a form of participation that encourages active involvement and refers to the involvement of one or more individuals. Therefore, when we speak of involvement, we are referring to the activities, measures, and conditions that a company must take or create to generate a high level of commitment from customers or employees. Engagement, as a form of personal involvement or commitment, is therefore the result of involvement.
Involvement is the degree to which an individual or group is willing to engage with a particular issue or environment. In the professional world, a distinction is often made between high involvement and low involvement. Involvement is a component of human interaction that needs to be understood as thoroughly as possible and, ideally, used in a targeted way.
Companies usually want to ensure that certain people are willing to engage particularly intensively and persistently with a topic, a product, or the company itself. Sometimes, companies are also urged to interact with stakeholders. These can include trade unions and authorities, as well as banks and interest groups. In these cases, it is also useful to be aware of and employ the fundamentals and mechanisms of involvement.
Basically, we can talk about two forms of involvement:
It is important to understand that, depending upon the degree of complexity, involvement can also develop or diminish even in the absence of active involvement management. This may lead to positive situations for the company, but it does not necessarily do so. It can also lead to very disadvantageous situations. Involvement, therefore, is something entrepreneurs should not leave to chance when it comes to their most important stakeholders.
The benefits of active involvement strongly depend on which stakeholders are involved. Employees can be tied more closely to the company or to individual projects through active involvement. This usually leads them to take a greater interest in their own work and the benefits or success of their own work. This in turn leads to increased motivation, further growth and willingness to perform. With customer groups, active involvement can also lead to an increase in customer loyalty, demand and willingness to buy. But even with stakeholders who are less closely tied to the company, targeted involvement can lead to positive communication and decisions, such as in intentionally partnership-based collaborations with works councils or banks.
In this digital age of overstimulation and information overload, it is not very useful to simply reach out to stakeholders frequently, using every communication tool in the company arsenal. Despite the high flow of information, people are very capable of selection. It is precisely at times like these that humans continue to develop these skills. They filter messages according to individual patterns – and what is crucial in this filtering is the type of involvement involved.
The basic rules of interaction with stakeholders in the two categories of high and low involvement can be outlined as follows:
Employee Involvement
It is not enough to find and hire the best talent and then send those people to training. For employees to use their talents properly and realise their full potential, they must have a lasting intrinsic interest in the company or in what they themselves are doing. This interest comes from involvement. And, depending on the personality structure of the individual, employees can also be divided into categories of high and low involvement. To achieve optimal motivation, retention and performance, it is important to involve employees in important areas of the company and to create a positive culture.
Employee involvement means that employees are able to become personally involved in helping their company fulfil its mission and achieve its strategic goals. They can contribute their own ideas, expertise and individual approaches to the tasks at hand.
Employee involvement refers primarily to the work structures and processes that enable employees to systematically influence planning, preparations and decisions that affect their own work. It is therefore primarily a matter of having influence and helping to shape processes, and less about fundamental strategic decisions. Employees need to know about and understand these decisions in the first place to be able to develop their own involvement.
To enable successful involvement, employees should be allowed to participate in process-related decisions. They must have the appropriate skills and authority to do so, and there must be sufficient interaction as well as incentives to participate.
Elements of Employee Involvement
What steps do companies need to take to keep employee engagement high? Some companies still believe that offering as many material amenities as possible, such as fresh fruit every day, barista specialities, fitness classes, and company bikes with trendy event formats and cool organisational names, will lead to sustained high engagement. However, in Enterneering®, the answer is clear: successful companies are those that understand the elements of Enterneering® and have implemented them in their organisation appropriately. Therefore, no additional methods, approaches, or exercises are needed to successfully address the topic of involvement or engagement. In a way, positive engagement among employees and customers alike is one of the direct results of Enterneering®. The following elements have a direct effect on engagement:
Effective companies around the world understand the importance of employee involvement at all levels of the company. Some common elements are:
Finally, there is another characteristic that lies in the behaviour of those with special responsibility in the company: authenticity. Only those companies in which the top management authentically and credibly exemplifies and demands the elements of Enterneering® will have lasting and thus sustainable success in the commitment of their employees, and presumably, their customers as well.
Note to entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs on the practical application of this: With a far-reaching involvement approach, care should always be taken that employees are not put in situations where they may act beyond the limits of their own abilities and competencies. If employees are involved in deliberation and decision-making processes for which they do not have adequate qualifications, experience and competence, unwanted stress situations can quickly arise. Last but not least, in cases where this occurs, approaches or decisions developed from within the staff are subsequently relativised or changed by other people who are ultimately responsible for them. This quickly leads to frustration on all sides and works against the actual goal of involvement. Involvement should not be confused with grassroots democracy. In the end, business decisions and approaches are the personal responsibility of management and owners. Involvement must not lead to this becoming a subject of negotiation.
