Released: June 23, 2008

UTICA, New York – One out of every four working Americans (25%) describes their workplace as a dictatorship, while just 34% of bosses in the American workplace react well to valid criticism, according to a new Workplace Democracy Association/Zogby Interactive survey.

The survey also found that less than half of working Americans – 46% – said their workplace promotes creative or inventive ideas, while barely half – 51% – said their co-workers often feel motivated or are mostly motivated at work.

Asher Adelman, Founder and President of the Workplace Democracy Association, said that "As we prepare to commemorate our nation’s independence and celebrate the freedoms that we often take for granted, it is unfortunate and ironic that so many Americans work at organizations that are managed like mini-dictatorships." Just 52% of respondents in the nationwide survey said their boss treats subordinates well, the survey revealed.

"Traditionally-managed companies, by inadvertently draining the motivation levels of their employees, are stifling productivity, innovation, and creativity.  Companies cannot expect to remain competitive when such large numbers of employees do not feel like they are treated like responsible adults nor when they feel like their input has little or no impact on the company’s decision-making process," said Adelman.

Possible Solutions

Adopting democratic processes can have a significant impact on employee morale and thus improve their levels of productivity and creativity: 80% of workers said they work better when they are given the freedom to decide how to best do their job.

Another problem in the workplace identified in the survey: 31% of respondents said they believe that their human resources departments or upper management almost always or sometimes hire the wrong people. But, the survey indicated, a solution to poor hires may exist within the workplace. Almost one person in five (18%) workers said they would feel more motivated at work if employees were selected and hired by groups of coworkers instead of by the bosses.

"Companies that want to boost employee engagement levels must adopt democratic and innovative practices in the way the entire company is managed," said Adelman. "Executives should be sharing information with all employees about the company’s ongoing performance and goals, and employees should be empowered with greater discretion and decision-making abilities. In addition, it goes without saying that employees should be rewarded and compensated when the company is successful in achieving its goals."

The nationwide interactive survey was conducted May 20-22, 2008, and included 2,475 respondents. The measure of error is +/- 2.0 percentage points. This is the largest national representative study of this phenomenon in the U.S. to date.

The Workplace Democracy Association is the sole U.S. nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and raising awareness about the benefits of workplace democracy.

For content, contact: Asher Adelman, Workplace Democracy Association 949-273-4372 contact@workplace-democracy.org

For methodology, contact: Fritz Wenzel, 315-624-0200 ext. 229 or 419-205-0287 or fritz@zogby.com

Excerpt:

Do you have a bad boss or have you had a bad boss? If so, you’re not alone. Of all the people who quit their jobs, the vast majority do so because of a terrible boss. Bad bosses are a widespread phenomenon cutting across organizational, cultural and national boundaries. In fact, bad bosses cut across the boundaries of time too – they’ve been around ever since people have had bosses.

What’s our reaction to a bad boss? It is typically, "My boss is bad." The underlying accusation is that it’s the boss’s fault for being bad. In response to bad bosses – and often as a preventive measure too – bosses get sent on all kinds of courses, in the form of ‘leadership’ training. They get taught how to communicate, criticize, praise, motivate, inspire, serve and so on, all to turn them into ‘good’ bosses or leaders. The organization does other things too – it "empowers" you, it "flattens the hierarchy", calls you an "associate" rather than subordinate, and so forth.

Does all this really result in fundamental change? No. How do we know? Because people still fear their bosses and complain about them all the time. Bosses still throw their weight around. So the question is, why aren’t all the initiatives working?

Article: Elected Bosses: Top 10 FAQs
By Chetan Dhruve

Chetan Dhruve is the author of "Why Your Boss is Programmed to be a Dictator" (Cyan/Marshall Cavendish). You can visit his website at http://cvdhruve.com and contact him via email at cvdhruve@gmail.com.

1. Rather than the system, isn’t the leader the most important part of leadership?

No. This is because the most important part of leadership is the emergent property of the leadership system – freedom. Leaders are important of course, but freedom is what really counts.

2. Aren’t there times when a dictator is required?

Often, someone will say, "We need a strong dictator in certain situations.”  But what’s always left unspoken is, "And that dictator should be me, or a dictator like me, or a dictator I approve of".

So despite saying “we need a dictator”, that person still wants to have a say in who should lead. That means a vote. Would you gladly have a dictator you absolutely detest? No way.

3. This sounds like a recipe for a popularity contest. How can the best person for the job win?

In reality, this is an arrogant statement disguised as a question. What the statement really says is, “I know I will vote for the right person, but I don’t trust you and the others to do so.”

Just remember that the others could be thinking the same of you.

4. Voting sounds like a great idea. But how are we going to have elections?

Ultimately, votes are not about elections. Votes are about power. A vote is fundamentally an expression of power – your power over your leader.

The boss’s power over you is expressed through appraisals. Your continued existence – your pay, health insurance and so on – in the organization depends on it. The boss already ‘votes’ for you through the appraisal – if you get a good rating you’re voted in, a bad one means you’re voted out (fired). So your boss has a lot of power. Similarly, you should have the power to appraise your boss. Of course, it would be even better if, at the end of the appraisal, you expressed your decision through an actual vote.

5. We already have 360-degree feedback. Isn’t that good enough?

Has this “feedback power” reduced your fear of the boss? No. Is the boss scared of you because you are able to give feedback? No.

When you give feedback to a person whose position you cannot threaten, and on whom your position depends, it’s not a recipe for freedom. It’s a recipe for lying or, at best, sugarcoating the truth.

6. It is impractical. And won’t there be chaos?

Free systems can look very chaotic and messy. But in reality, they are tremendously strong. Take an example – a system with a really wild number of people, say about 300 million. The leaders regularly get thrown out by their people; there are lots of sub-level leaders (who also get regularly thrown out); the leaders are forever arguing with each other in public; their people are forever criticizing them and making fun of them in public; things happen by consensus; the top job is seemingly won by a popularity contest, and so on.

This is not just a hypothetical example. The name of this system is the United States – which also happens to be the world’s most powerful system. It may sound impractical to organize voting for hundreds of millions of people, yet it happens regularly.

Freedom can look like madness to an outsider. It can look impractical. It can even seem impossibly optimistic. In fact, that’s why dictators and subjects who have never been exposed to freedom have such a hard time understanding it.

7. We already empower our people. What’s the need in giving them the vote?

Empowerment and freedom are two different things. Subordinates may be empowered in certain ways to do certain things. But why then, are they still afraid of the boss on some level?
The answer is simple: the boss can throw them out anytime, and they don’t have corresponding powers over their bosses.

8. What about subordinates who behave badly with bosses?

This happens, but extremely rarely. In his best-selling book, The No Asshole Rule, Stanford professor Bob Sutton says, "’upward nastiness’ – where underlings take on their superiors – occurs in less than 1 per cent of cases."

9. I already know my boss is a dictator. I don’t need a fancy ‘systems’ theory to tell me that. Why is a theory so important?

A long time ago, before the theory of gravity was discovered, people knew that if you jumped off a height, you would fall down and possibly get hurt. They didn’t need the theory of gravity to tell them that.

But once the theory of gravity came along, we understood why people fell down. A theory helps us understand things, and that puts us in a better position to solve problems. Knowledge of the theory of gravity has helped us achieve amazing feats – sending a man to the moon, satellite TV, and so on.

Sometimes, just understanding a situation helps tremendously. It’s like discovering the cause of a mysterious illness – even if we can’t find an immediate cure, we can rest in the knowledge that at the very least, we understand the problem. This also puts us in a better position to find a solution. 

10. My subordinates tell me that I’m a truly nice boss. So obviously the system hasn’t influenced me. Doesn’t that disprove your theory?

Just because your subordinates tell you that you’re a nice boss, that doesn’t change anything. Dictators don’t have to be nasty people. The King of Saudi Arabia is not known to be a brute. Perhaps he’s even very nice and kind. But that doesn’t mean his people are truly free. 

Also, let’s say I guarantee that you will get a “nice” or “great” president/leader at the next elections. In return, would you be willing to give up your right to vote forever? No? Why not? Because the loss of the vote results in the loss of freedom.

The system always gets you in the end. You may be nice, but how do you know if there have been times when your subordinates haven’t spoken up? Moreover, the power difference between boss and subordinate results in a difference in status and perception. You may think you are a nice boss, but a simple request for a favour to a subordinate can be perceived as an order. 

The system’s influence means that subordinates become subservient, and there’s no telling when and how this will manifest itself.

—————————–

Chetan Dhruve is the author of "Why Your Boss is Programmed to be a Dictator" (Cyan/Marshall Cavendish). You can visit his website at http://cvdhruve.com and contact him via email at cvdhruve@gmail.com.

Do you have a bad boss or have you had a bad boss? If so, you’re not alone. Of all the people who quit their jobs, the vast majority do so because of a terrible boss. Bad bosses are a widespread phenomenon cutting across organizational, cultural and national boundaries. In fact, bad bosses cut across the boundaries of time too – they’ve been around ever since people have had bosses.

What’s our reaction to a bad boss? It is typically, "My boss is bad." The underlying accusation is that it’s the boss’s fault for being bad. In response to bad bosses – and often as a preventive measure too – bosses get sent on all kinds of courses, in the form of ‘leadership’ training. They get taught how to communicate, criticize, praise, motivate, inspire, serve and so on, all to turn them into ‘good’ bosses or leaders. The organization does other things too – it "empowers" you, it "flattens the hierarchy", calls you an "associate" rather than subordinate, and so forth.

Does all this really result in fundamental change? No. How do we know? Because people still fear their bosses and complain about them all the time. Bosses still throw their weight around. So the question is, why aren’t all the initiatives working?

To answer this, we need to ask a deeper question: is it that there are too many bad individuals, or is something else going on?

The strange answer is that our workplaces have been unthinkingly designed to be production lines of bad bosses. It’s as normal to get a bad boss as it is to have a car come out of a car-making factory. If a truck came out of a car factory, that would be abnormal. Similarly, a good boss is actually an abnormality.

How so? The clue lies in the definition of ‘leader’. Typically, we don’t have managers, supervisors or plain old bosses any more. We have ‘leaders’ – team leaders, project leaders, group leaders, division leaders and other forms of the exalted leader. But who exactly is a ‘leader’? Let’s define that first.

Who is a leader?

When it comes to leading people, we actually have a very clear answer that cuts through the clutter of ‘leader’ definitions: A leader is someone who is elected by those he is leading. There are good leaders and bad leaders, but before someone gets called ‘leader’, he has to satisfy one non-negotiable criterion – that of being elected.

Conversely, if someone has power over you and ‘leads’ without your having a vote, we have a different word for that person: dictator.

Your boss has power over you. But you don’t have a vote. That makes your boss a dictator. And because you don’t have power over your dictator, that makes you a subject. Remember, this is by definition, not by opinion.

What happens when boss and subordinate interact – or more accurately, when dictator and subject interact? This is not as simple a question as it sounds. To understand interactions, we need to use a field of study that studies interactions and their effects.

Studying interactions contrasts with our current way of thinking – analysis. Using analysis, we typically break issues down to small parts, and hope that by fixing each part, the overall problem will go away. That’s why, when trying to "fix" boss behaviour, we assume that the behaviour is the boss’s fault. And then we try to "fix" that behaviour through training.

But instead of studying the boss, we need to study the interaction between the boss and the subordinate. To do this, we can use a field of study called Systems Thinking that studies wholes and the interactions between their constituent parts. What does that really mean?   

A brief introduction to Systems Thinking

First, let’s define ’system’. A system is something that results from the interactions among its constituent parts. Without the interactions, the system ceases to exist. Take an example – water. Water is made up of two gases – hydrogen and oxygen. When hydrogen and oxygen interact, we get water. Water cannot exist without this interaction. It’s actually quite strange, when you think about it, that a liquid is made up of two gases. If you didn’t know any better, you could quite reasonably guess that water is a liquid made of two liquids.

If water is made up of gases, where did this property of liquidity come from? In the language of Systems Thinking, liquidity is an "emergent property" – it emerges from the interactions of the individual components of water (the two gases). Hence in Systems Thinking, it’s important to understand that the properties of the system may not be the properties of the individual parts.

Now, what does all this have to do with bosses? Let’s apply the definition of ’system’ to human relationships. Every relationship’s existence depends on the interactions between two (or more) people. If a person opts out of the relationship, the entity ‘relationship’ ceases to exist. Hence, a relationship is a system.

Now, what system results from the interactions between a dictator and a subject? A dictatorship system. This means every organization that has a boss-subordinate way of working is a dictatorship system, comprising of several mini-dictatorships.
What’s the predominant emergent property for the subject in a dictatorship system? Fear. And for the dictator, it is power-abuse in the form of arrogance, pettiness, "I know it all", and so on.

It’s important to note that these properties of fear and power abuse are emergent properties. They come about automatically, without conscious effort on anyone’s part. Outside the dictatorship system, a subject could be fearless, while the dictator could be timid. Scientific experiments, most famously the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), have shown that more than our personality or character, it’s the situation we’re in that determines our behaviour. As Philip Zimbardo, the lead scientist on the SPE said, "If you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples."

In short, put people in a dictatorship system, and they will behave accordingly. Because everything happens automatically as a result of the system, our workplaces are, in effect, production lines of bad bosses and abject subjects. Of course, these workplace behaviors could be masked quite sophisticatedly – a display of fear does not mean terrified trembling – it could be as simple as a subordinate not speaking up in a meeting. Equally, a boss may not scream or shout – it could just be a look that says, "Do what I say and don’t ask me difficult questions."

That’s not the end of the problem. The more serious issue is that honest and accurate information can be withheld from the boss. When this happens all the way up, top-management is fed information that is severely distorted or just plain wrong. Overall, this results in poor decision-making, potentially resulting in catastrophic consequences for the organization.

The system is all-powerful. That is why no amount of training or tinkering with hierarchies is ever going to really help. The only way to change behavior is to change the system in which people work. This of course, raises another question.

What system do we change to?

Simple. We need to change to a system in which freedom is an emergent property. In what kind of system would we find freedom? You know the answer to this one – a system in which people vote for their leaders.

This may sound idealistic and unrealistic, but consider this. Hundreds of millions of people vote for their leaders in systems such as the US, UK, Australia, Japan, Germany, France and so on. Moreover, these free systems are much more powerful, wealthier, and more competitive than "fear" systems such as Libya, Syria, North Korea or Zimbabwe. Of course, you may argue that China flouts the theory, but it doesn’t. China began gaining competitiveness only after economic liberalization (ie becoming more economically free). And in any case, a better question to ask is, "How much more rich and powerful would China have been, had it given its citizens the right to vote?

For organizations that want to compete and win in the future, the lesson is this: the path to success is paved with freedom – the genuine freedom that results when subordinates have the right to vote for their bosses.

The idea of having subordinates vote for their bosses provokes many questions. The most common ones are addressed in this list of frequently asked questions.

________________________

Chetan Dhruve is the author of "Why Your Boss is Programmed to be a Dictator" (Cyan/Marshall Cavendish). You can visit his website at http://cvdhruve.com and contact him via email at cvdhruve@gmail.com.

Excerpt:

One in four U.S. workers says their workplace is a dictatorship, according to a survey released by Workplace Democracy Association, a nonprofit started by Orange County native Asher Adelman.

“So many companies are dealing with problems of keeping employees motivated and engaged,” Adelman said.

Workers blast workplace dictatorships
Reuters
June 25, 2008

Excerpt:

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) – A quarter of working Americans view their workplace as a dictatorship and less than half think it promotes creativity, according to a U.S. survey on employee attitudes.

But a Zogby poll of 2,475 people commissioned by the nonprofit organization Workplace Democracy Association in Las Vegas also found that 51 percent of Americans said their co-workers often feel motivated.

"We live in a free and open society, but many of our workplace organizations use command-and-control style," Asher Adelman, founder and president of the association which advocates democratic policies in the workforce, said in an interview.

Innovative management: A conversation with Gary Hamel and Lowell Bryan
The McKinsey Quarterly
November 2007

Excerpt:

When you read the history of management and of early pioneers like Frederick Taylor, you realize that management was designed to solve a very specific problem—how to do things with perfect replicability, at ever-increasing scale and steadily increasing efficiency.

Now there’s a new set of challenges on the horizon. How do you build organizations that are as nimble as change itself? How do you mobilize and monetize the imagination of every employee, every day? How do you create organizations that are highly engaging places to work in? And these challenges simply can’t be met without reinventing our 100-year-old management model.

Forward-looking executives will respond to this looming challenge by bringing the same energy to innovative management that they now bring to innovative products and services.

The opportunity is substantial. Against the backdrop of the digital age’s dramatic technological change, ongoing globalization, and the declining predictability of strategic-planning models, only new approaches to managing employees and organizing talent to maximize wealth creation will provide companies with a durable competitive advantage. It won’t be easy. As companies discard decades of management orthodoxy, they will have to balance revolutionary thinking with practical experimentation to feel their way to new, innovative management models.

The Anti-CEO 
The Conference Board Review

Excerpt:

Many people picture the head of a company as the clear-eyed captain who pilots his ship through stormy seas into calm waters and a safe haven. Ricardo Semler, who heads a Brazilian company named Semco, has another view: He believes it is his duty to roil the waters and even poke a few holes in his craft, to get his crew thinking of other options. In other words, Semler is a disruptive rather than a soothing influence, and he likes it that way.

Semler might be called the CEO of Semco, but he is not the CEO; he might be called the president of the company, but he is not the president. He abhors titles, for himself and all the other executives. Safest to say, and incontrovertibly, Semler is the principal shareholder of Semco, which over the last ten years has grown from $35 million to $212 million in annual revenues, and which expects to be a billion-dollar company in five years.

He is also, through his writing and ideas, the main reason this Brazilian company is known throughout the world. Some of the policies and programs at Semco:

• Attendance at all company meetings is voluntary.
• Two of the company’s eight board seats are held on a first-come-first-served basis, open to any worker in the company.
• Semco has no business plan, no mission statement, no long-term budget, no HR department, no VP of IT, no COO, no fixed CEO, no dress codes, and no job descriptions. Nobody approves expense accounts.
• Workers choose their own training instead of having their boss or HR choose it for them.
• Workers can take up to three years off for any purpose.
• Through Semco’s Retire-a-Little program, a worker in his prime can take days off now and "redeem" them in the future, after he retires.
• Semco’s "Lost in Space" program allows young recruits to wander the company for a year to discover what they want to do.
• The company holds collective job interviews, in which candidates meet their rivals for the position and are interviewed by a cross-section of employees.

Is Ricardo Semler responsible for these policies and programs? Not directly. He can’t be the "go-to guy," he explains, since he is rarely there, at company headquarters in São Paulo; he doesn’t have regular hours, or an office, and his hammock at home, in which he professes to do a lot of work, is not conducive to meetings. But it’s obvious that Semler, from the time he took over his father’s company in 1980, has been interested in doing things differently, in testing untested waters, and in encouraging all of Semco’s employees to do the same.

Management Leaders Turn Attention to Followers
The Wall Street Journal

Excerpt:

Experts in leadership are plentiful, and Barbara Kellerman, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, counts herself as one of them. Now, though, Ms. Kellerman and some other management experts are turning their attention to the other extreme of the organization chart: what matters to followers.

In "Followership," a book being published this winter, Ms. Kellerman argues that a big organization’s fate can be surprisingly dependent on how well it understands thousands of low-ranking employees, and makes them more effective. Entrepreneurs Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom took a similar perspective last year in their book, "The Starfish and the Spider," suggesting that lower-ranking employees, called catalysts, need to drive organizational change, instead of top bosses.

Among these authors’ precepts: companies should look for passionate employees, keep them informed and give them room to carry out useful projects.  Such messages resonate at a host of big companies, including Best Buy Co., United Parcel Service Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. Executives at such companies say they’ve grown more interested in followers as they’ve seen the Internet flatten traditional lines of command and empower grassroots employees.

Some executives also believe that leadership has been studied to exhaustion, making fresh insights rare. By contrast, there’s been much less attention to what makes followers tick. Companies that can achieve breakthroughs in this latter area may be able to build lasting competitive advantages.

We’re All the Boss
Time Magazine
April 8, 2002

Excerpt:

When a machine operator left W.L. Gore last year, the human-resources department naturally began looking for a replacement. Then before anyone got as far as posting a want ad, the man’s former team members met and figured out how they could make do with one less body. They would have to work harder without more pay, but they wanted to do what was best for the enterprise. "That doesn’t happen at other companies," says human-resources associate Sonia Dunbar, 43. "It’s the beauty of Gore."

The cooperative spirit at this company–maker of the Gore-Tex waterproof fabric found in all sorts of outdoor clothing–arises from a unique structure with no fixed hierarchy, few titles and no formal job descriptions. Any "associate" (the company doesn’t use the word employee) can speak directly to any other without going through a chain of command. And together the 6,000 associates own the company. Sound like pie in the sky? The system has worked superbly for 44 years. Despite the recession last year, sales at Gore, based in Newark, Del., reached $1.4 billion, up from $1.3 billion in 2000.

The Sinatra of Southwest Feels the Love
The New York Times
May 24, 2008

Excerpt:

Southwest, of course, is the great success story of the airline business — the only company that has been consistently profitable through these tumultuous times, even as many competitors have filed for bankruptcy or gone out of business. In 2007, it earned $645 million. It maintains a healthy balance sheet and has plenty of cash. Its annual meetings tend to be love fests.

This year, though, was the love fest to end all love fests. The company’s beloved co-founder, Herbert D. Kelleher — known to one and all as Herb — was stepping down as chairman after 37 years. So many shareholders showed up that the company had to set up an overflow room to accommodate the crowd.

When Mr. Kelleher, 77, entered the main meeting room, shareholders gave him the kind of standing ovation usually reserved for rock stars. The Southwest pilots union is also in the process of negotiating a new contract with management. But not only did the Southwest pilots not set up a picket line, they took out a full page ad in USA Today thanking Mr. Kelleher for all he had done. “The pilots of Southwest Airlines want to express our sentiment to Herb that it has been an honor and a privilege to be a part of his aviation legacy,” said the union president, Carl Kowitzky, in a statement.

Over the years, whenever reporters would ask him the secret to Southwest’s success, Mr. Kelleher had a stock response. “You have to treat your employees like customers,” he told Fortune in 2001. “When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us.” As he stepped away from the company this week, his line didn’t change.

Even as Southwest’s salaries climbed to parity with the legacy airlines — indeed, one reason the unions loved Mr. Kelleher so much is that he never believed in holding out for every penny during labor negotiations — the company still kept its ticket prices low because its employee productivity was so much higher than its competitors’. Its pilots spent more time flying and less time on the ground. Southwest could turn around an airplane in 20 minutes. Its short hauls were more fuel-efficient than most big airlines’ long hauls. One reason the old-line carriers are in trouble and Southwest isn’t is that they just can’t operate as efficiently as Southwest.

Workplace democracy is seen by many as the key to developing a culture of ownership in the organization, and is therefore crucial to enhancing competitiveness and productivity, to fostering creativity and innovation, and to combating employee turnover and disengagement.

The foundation of workplace democracy is based on one of the first lessons that we learn as young children – the importance of sharing.  There are three things that successful democratic workplaces share amongst their employees: information, discretion, and rewards.

Sharing Information

If employees are unaware of their company’s goals and performance, it is easy for them to lose sight of the importance or significance of their tasks and how they contribute to the attainment of the company’s goals.  Every employee should therefore know and understand the company’s goals as well as how the company is performing and progressing towards those goals.  If necessary, employees are trained so that everyone is able to understand the company’s financial and other important data.  People are then able to better manage their own activities and to help keep customers happy, sales growing, and expenses to a minimum.

Sharing Discretion

If employees are knowledgeable about the company goals and about how their jobs fit into the overall picture, then employees should also have the discretion to decide on the best way of performing their own tasks.  People who have the power to decide HOW to do their jobs will feel a greater amount of ownership and pride in their tasks, and they will be more motivated to succeed.  In addition, one of the main reasons for the success of democratic governments is the ability of people to elect their leaders and representatives.  Many of the benefits of workplace democracy will remain unachievable without similar processes.   

Sharing Rewards

Employees have always shared (often disproportionately) in the consequences of poor company performance, either via layoffs or decreased compensation.  Employees should also participate in the upside when companies are successful in achieving their goals.  This is the most effective way to align employees’ interests with those of the company.  Examples of shared financial rewards are Employee Stock Option Plans (ESOP) and companywide profit-sharing programs.

Studies show that these three processes must implemented together in order to unlock the benefits of workplace democracy.

"Most of the 3,500 or so American firms in which workers own a majority of the stock are organized as conventional hierarchies. But evidence is growing that the most successful firms are those that find some consistent way of empowering workers.

"A 1993 survey of 188 companies conducted by the Washington State Office of Trade and Economic Development found that employee-owned firms grew no faster than conventional companies unless they gave workers a voice in management. Likewise, broader sharing of information and authority with workers didn’t boost growth unless that was combined with ownership. But firms that put the three together grew about 12% faster than their competitors.

"To see the difference between merely giving stock and letting workers shape their destiny, look at the airline industry. In return for lower wages in 1994, United Airlines pilots and mechanics got more than half the company’s stock. But life inside the cockpit and at loading ramps barely changed. By contrast, Southwest Airlines employees own only about 11% of the company’s stock, but the company works to encourage and implement workers’ suggestions, in part through town hall-style forums with top management. While there are other important differences between the carriers, workplace culture is a big reason United posted record losses last year while Southwest made a healthy profit–as it has for 29 years.

"Corey Rosen, executive director of the National Center for Employee Ownership, says workers "don’t necessarily have to have a vote on the board. What’s really important is to have an influence on the way you do your day-to-day job." In exchange for that little bit of power and a stake in using it well, most workers will do whatever they can for their company." ("We’re All the Boss", Time Magazine, April 8, 2002)

The main goals of the Workplace Democracy Association are to raise awareness and educate the public about the benefits of applying democratic principles in the workplace as well as to assist organizations in the process of implementing and expanding democratic policies in their organizations.
 
Our Mission

Our mission is to educate and advocate about workplace democracy.

Our Vision

We believe that workplace democracy improves innovation and competitiveness, that it increases productivity through greater employee engagement and participation, and that it maximizes human potential and quality of life by enhancing the self-worth, dignity, and well-being of people.

Therefore, we envision a world where workplace democracy is widely recognized as a catalyst for economic prosperity, where the great majority of employees are able to more effectively and efficiently contribute to the success of the companies where they work, and where employees are able to share in the success and wealth that they help create.

Contact Us: contact@workplace-democracy.org