Information-Sharing, Decision-Making and Performance

Nigel Holloway from EIU discusses the study's findings

EIU's Nigel Holloway discusses the study's findings

Series of short video clips

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Companies Perform Better When Employees Feel Enabled

Study produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and sponsored by Microsoft

January 10, 2008

The EIU surveyed more than 1,300 executives, managers, and employees at companies around the world to assess levels of enablement, job satisfaction, and corporate performance. While 90 percent of respondents cited enablement as important, only half the companies surveyed have the tools necessary to fully enable employees. In this series of short videos, Nigel Holloway from EIU discusses why the top-down approach some companies take to information-sharing and decision-making may cost them competitive advantage.

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Information-Sharing, Decision-Making, and Performance

Based on Ready, Willing, and Enabled: A Formula for Performance, a paper from the Economist Intelligence Unit sponsored by Microsoft.

Enablement means giving employees the wherewithal—organizational structure, information technology, and other resources that lead to confident decision-making—to do their jobs well. According to an online survey and interviews conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) for a study commissioned by Microsoft, 87 percent of respondents rate enablement as important to employees’ sense of pride and confidence in their work.

Yet only about half of the companies surveyed indicated they provide access to the IT tools and information that their employees need to feel enabled. Why this gap between the perception of the importance of enablement, and the implementation of enabling technologies and structures?

Command-and-control corporate hierarchies produce a silo effect, in which information is not shared. Companies that operate in this way can appear not to trust their employees, who consequently feel unable to make important decisions and take risks. While managers may think this increased control reduces corporate risk, this study shows that collaborative and fully informed risk-taking has bottom-line benefits. Read the complete article.

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