Introduction

The Workplace Innovation Toolkit (WIToolkit) is an online questionnaire designed to facilitate self-evaluation of the capacity of a business to be an innovative workplace, under the four pillars of:

– Employee engagement

– Innovation

– Productivity and

– Training

This is an initiative under the Action Plan for Jobs (APJ) to provide a resource for ambitious businesses to innovate and compete successfully in an increasingly uncertain global trading environment, and to demonstrate how workplace innovation can play a role in improving competitiveness, growth and job creation. It has been developed by DBEI with the support of WRC, EI, IDA, ICTU, IBEC, IDA, NSAI, SOLAS and Skillnets.

All businesses face many challenges, such as the need to

  • develop new products, find, service, and retain customers
  • attract the right people to work with and develop as the business grows and evolves
  • respond to external challenges such as Brexit, currency fluctuations, changes in consumer demand, and transforming technologies.

Business can prepare, adapt and adjust to meet these and future challenges by choosing how to organise, and how to work together as a team, Workplace Innovation is about how best to do this.   It describes the approach taken to make optimum use of a business’s prime resource – their people. It illustrates how a team of people, led in an effective way, can bring value to a business for the employer, employee and the wider society.

GETTING STARTED

– Link to the Workplace Innovation Toolkit: https://witool.dbei.gov.ie/#/ei-login

Objectives

  • To encourage businesses to take a proactive approach to improving their performance and work practices.
  • Develop a practical approach to assist all businesses and their workforces to identify where there is scope to improve, become more resilient and sustainable, enhance skills, and help maintain and create employment.
  • Signposting businesses to the relevant supports to improve their work place practices leading to improved business performance.

Workplace Innovation complements the drive to adopt and develop Lean/operational excellence within businesses. It is about being more productive, competitive and profitable, developing a positive work environment and delivering results.

How the Process Works

This system is designed to enable a single individual right up to an unlimited number of employees in a company to participate.  Each person will be asked a number of questions about the organisations Employee Engagement, Innovation, Productivity and Training approaches and will have the option to complete the survey anonymously.  The whole process takes only a matter of minutes.

If you are registering your organisation for the first time, you will by default become the administrator for your business.  The administrator invites colleagues to join in the exercise and complete the survey, as each person is added, the system will send them their own unique user name and password.  The role of administrator can be handed over to a colleague that has been registered under the business.

Output - What you Get

There are two types of output reports with invaluable signposting to relevant, high quality events and resources to help drive improvement.

  • a personalised report for each individual respondent
  • a company report, generated only if there are 2 or more respondents

Company report:

The company report will show the average result for the company’s individual respondents. It will be generated only where two or more respondents be they managers or employees undertake the exercise and where the anonymity of the respondents is intact. It will provide the basis to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the business and can be used to start the conversation on how best to enhance the business’s capability to prepare, adapt and respond to change and move closer to best practice.

Personal report:

The personal report is just that, personal and private and available only to the individual respondents. It will be enable each respondent to assess their strengths and weaknesses under the four pillars. They may choose to use it to start the conversation on how best to enhance their skills to enable them to prepare, adapt and respond to changes in the workplace and help the business to move closer to best practice.