OurStrategy: Employee Voice In Transnational Strategy Development

Title of the Paper

OurStrategy: Employee Voice In Transnational Strategy Development

Paper Information

• Subject Area: Application of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in organizational strategy development
• Keywords: Organizational strategy, employee voice, workplace, large-scale qualitative research, collaborative decision-making, digital tools

Research Background and Issues

• Identified Problems or Challenges:

  • Qualitative research is essential for understanding the complex contexts and processes within workplaces, but traditional methods are time-consuming, costly, and difficult to scale.
  • Decision-making in internationally distributed organizations involving participants from multilingual and multicultural backgrounds is highly complex.
  • Employee and stakeholder voices are often overlooked, and traditional methods fail to capture their nuanced perspectives adequately.

• Importance of the Issues:

  • Organizational strategy is a critical foundation for decision-making in nonprofit organizations, determining the future direction and resource allocation, thereby impacting the lives and welfare of countless individuals.
  • Ensuring transparent, effective decision-making that reflects diverse perspectives in decentralized international organizations can enhance social impact and governance levels.

• Research Motivation and Related Work:

  • Existing research and practices often focus on ensuring the safety of employee voice expression but lack exploration of large-scale, in-depth qualitative research processes.
  • Academic studies in the nonprofit sector emphasize the importance of improving decision quality and fostering trust communication through employee voices.
  • Optimizing the use and design of existing technological platforms to support large-scale collaborative activities has been demonstrated to be effective in related scenarios by some studies and practices.

Solution

• Proposed Solution:

  • Develop and implement an innovative semi-automated method called "OurStrategy," which leverages large-scale qualitative research to enhance the role of employee voice in organizational strategy development.
  • Apply the "unplatforming" design approach by integrating existing technological infrastructures (e.g., Microsoft 365) to support large-scale interviews, analysis, and collaboration processes.

• Innovative Features:

  • Establish a large-scale, iterative qualitative research framework that provides end-to-end support for strategy formation in internationally distributed organizations.
  • Incorporate employee ideas and perceptions into the strategy development process, promoting the practice of "collaborative democratization" (employee democracy).
  • Simplify processes and enhance participation convenience and sustainability by utilizing widely adaptable existing tools and infrastructures (e.g., MS Teams).
  • Partially automate data collection and analysis processes, significantly reducing costs and time investment.

• Implementation Steps and Key Technologies:

  • Design Phase: Define research questions, set themes and objectives, design interviews, prepare documentation, and establish relevant standards.
  • Implementation Phase: Conduct interviews by employees, record key themes, and engage in dialogue with stakeholders.
  • Tagging and Perception Phase: Organize and tag data, convert interview results into specific themes, and ensure accuracy through cross-team validation.
  • Analysis Phase: Analyze data by the organizational management team, summarize strategic recommendations, and provide guidance for future planning.
  • Utilize automated tools for data storage, transcription, translation, and theme extraction (including natural language processing).

Research Results

• Specific Outcomes:

  • Collected and analyzed 65 interviews from six countries, covering 1,219 specific themes and summarizing them into 15 major theme groups.
  • Produced a strategic document encompassing a wide range of opinions, including transnational common issues and region- or country-specific challenges and recommendations.
  • Significantly enhanced the diversity and accuracy of organizational decision-making through employee participation and annotation.

• Advantages Compared to Existing Solutions:

  • Superior to traditional survey methods by addressing the lack of depth and richness in dialogue through interactive conversations.
  • More comprehensive than traditional employee voice methods, covering a broader range of stakeholders and reflecting the complexity of real-world issues.
  • Highly flexible, allowing process adjustments based on actual circumstances and reducing dependency on complex technologies and specialized training.

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  • Compared to traditional organizational strategies, strategies based on OurStrategy are more detailed and better reflect local needs as well as global common issues.
  • Provides an effective mechanism for validating existing strategies while addressing gaps in official strategic documents.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  • Data quality may be affected by process configurations, such as insufficient iterations or overly closed question designs.
  • Internal organizational issues (e.g., cultural development and talent cultivation) are not fully addressed and may require further internal focus optimization.
  • Although the study demonstrates the method's effectiveness, further exploration is needed to compare the cost-effectiveness of the new method with traditional qualitative research and verify its applicability.

Future research could explore enhancing the integration of internal and external stakeholders, further refining the data analysis process, and comparing the practical benefits of different qualitative research methods.