Background of the project

Key macro-issues to be tackled are:

1. the interplay between representative/indirect and direct forms of worker voice and its key determinants.

2. the contribution of this interplay to workplace innovation, looking particularly at the conditions and the ways through which representative and direct employee voice contribute to addressing current organisational, digital and environmental challenges in European workplaces, thus enabling fair and inclusive transitions.

3. the trajectories of change of labour relations as a result of representatives’ and workers’ involvement in workplace innovation.

Focus in research and impact

BroadVoice consortium deems of utmost importance to conduct more in-depth qualitative analyses on concrete experiences on employee-driven innovation accompanied and managed by industrial relations (which are still largely missing in international literature), with the aim to achieve the following specific objectives:

1. to shed light on existing interactions, across different EU countries and economic sectors, between industrial relations and direct employee voice for workplace innovation.

2. to involve workplace-level social partners (both from labour and business side) from different EU countries in high-quality discussions with national scholars and researchers on these topics and enable a greater number of workplace-level industrial relations actors to successfully engage in the co-design and co-management of employee-driven innovation.

3. to increase general public attention on these topics at the EU-level as well as to engage different researchers, policy-makers and experts in Europe (in addition to those directly involved in the consortium) in a transnational high-level debate on these issues so as to favour an exchange of views, studies and experiences between the BroadVoice consortium and other EU-level actors and enlarge the project scope and network.

Consortium

Research consortium: ADAPT (coordinator), Workplace Innovation Europe CLG, University of Amsterdam, Lulea University of Technology, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, University of Ljubljana.

BroadVoice also involves 14 national and EU-level social partners, supporting data collection and dissemination of main project outputs.

Co-financing: European Commission (DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion).

Duration: October 2023 – September 2025.