Informing the right employees about possible problems, so they can contribute solutions, helps companies survive the credit crunch. Says Trude Maas in the monday issue of the Dutch newspaper het Financieel Dagblad.

Maas is business columnist for het Financieel Dagblad and former senator of the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA). She is also chairwoman of the board of directors of Philips, and member of the boards of amongst others ABN AMRO and Amsterdam Schiphol Airport.

“Fewer expenses, more revenue. We know the mantra by now. The importance of added value, however, is mentioned considerably less often”, Maas says.

Talent
Maas states that staff are often jointly responsible for this added value. “Employees are the biggest asset roaming the work floor, and the driving force behind many innovative ideas.” It is important to make optimal use of the staff’s ‘united brains’ by informing them on all the company’s numbers and mobilizing them. Something that is done far too rarely, thinks Maas. “In many organizations a lot of talent remains unused, because we don’t know how to access it.”

According to Maas there is a dire need for new organizational structures (bottom-up instead of top-down), enabling “companies to adjust more quickly to their changing environments.” Organizations should ask themselves whether the right employees are aware of which products and services make a profit and which do not. Do these employees get the opportunity to analyze this information and work towards improvement? These are just a couple of questions, to which the answer might be ‘no’.

A missed opportunity? Will the inclusion of staff in the decision making process lead to innovative ideas that pay off? And to what extend does this apply to financial institutions? Something to think about.