The diagnostic toolkit consists of an online questionnaire designed to facilitate self-evaluation of the organisation’s capacity to be an innovative workplace. The toolkit is based of four pillars and signposts resources and supports to enhance performance in the areas of employee engagement, training, innovation, and productivity.
Workplace Innovation Toolkit URL: https://witool.dbei.gov.ie/
Background Briefing
Action Plan for Jobs 2018 is focused on embedding the progress made, positioning ourselves to take new opportunities as they arise, and ensuring that our enterprises are focused around resilience in the face of significant challenges. The four key immediate aims of the Action Plan for Jobs 2018 are:
- That Ireland’s enterprise base remains successful amid the uncertainty created by Brexit;
- That all parts of the country achieve their potential in terms of job creation;
- That those entering, re-entering, or in the workforce have the incentives and skills needed to prosper; and
- That Ireland’s enterprise base remains successful by focusing relentlessly on competitiveness, productivity, and innovation.
The workplace innovation toolkit is an action in Action Plan for Jobs 2018 (Action 39). Based on four pillars of employee engagement; innovation; productivity; and training, it was launched at the Enterprise Excellence Ireland 2018 event organised by Enterprise Ireland in Croke Park on Wednesday 23rd May 2018.
This diagnostic toolkit will offer signposts to companies to the relevant supports that will help them improve and grow their business.
Workplace Innovation
Building resilience and achieving and sustaining world-class levels of performance and innovation requires an integrated approach to investment in new technologies, skills and empowering workplace practices. Workplace innovation is about the systematic adoption of workplace practices, grounded in evidence, that unleash employee-led knowledge, skill and innovation at every level of the organisation, and is recognised as one further method to help retain and ultimately increase employment.
Evidence shows that workplace innovation leads to significant and sustainable improvements both in organisational performance (e.g. increased productivity, financial performance and profitability, and improved customer service), and in employee engagement and well-being (playing a particularly important role in reducing stress, enhancing job satisfaction and mental health, and improving retention).
Government Policy
As a small open economy with a young and well-educated workforce Enterprise 2025 Renewed noted that the prospects for continued growth are strong, while also highlighting the need to place an increased emphasis on the areas of Innovation and Talent and Skills.
Innovation 2020 sets out our ambition to be a Global Innovation Leader and we need to realise this ambition if we are to minimise the impact of any potential downturn and to embed resilience.
It is people who innovate, who have ideas, who build networks. Our ability to develop, nurture, retain and attract talent has never been more critical than it is in today’s dramatically changing world.
Enterprise 2025 together with Innovation 2020 and the National Skills Strategy 2025 provide coherent, complementary and mutually reinforcing strategies focused on developing and attracting talent.
Enterprise 2025 set out a broad agenda for talent development, retention and attraction – for new ways of working, for leadership and management development. Considerable strides have been made over the past couple of years. The National Skills Strategy 2025 was published in January 2016 and aligns with Enterprise 2025 setting out clear objectives that place a stronger focus on providing skills development opportunities that are relevant to the needs of the economy.
Innovation 2020 commits to supporting the full continuum of talent development to ensure a sufficient quantity and quality of people for the creation and development of research-informed innovative products, processes and services. A National Skills Council (NSC) was established in April 2017 to advise on prioritisation and delivery of identified skills needs. It will have a key role in promoting and reporting on the delivery of responses by education and training providers to those priorities.
Investment in skills development in the workplace remains lower than we would like, based on agency supported data. Increasingly companies cite the need for promoting a range of options to the individual that includes apprenticeships as well as tertiary education. Furthermore, SMEs find it challenging to identify what their future skills need might be. Improving the capabilities of our people involves a rolling agenda for action. Right now, we need to focus on the skills needed in a post Brexit era, for internationalisation to non-English-speaking markets, and for an increasingly digitised world.
