Demetriades, Stavroula

Companies are constantly competing for the next big thing in innovation – the next-generation 3D phone, the quantum computer, the virtual doctor. They fixate on technological breakthroughs and look for new business models. But innovation also needs systems, an organisational structure and people who work together. The human factor in innovation is often forgotten or neglected – the employees’ skills, their level of input, their autonomy in their jobs and the rewards they receive. Or do such factors really play any role in innovation?

The purpose of this short report is to provide a synthesis of Eurofound data and analysis regarding the situation of young people in Greece for the Greek government. The recent economic crisis has exacerbated the problem of youth integration in the labour market in the EU and Greece has been disproportionately affected.

Innovation is an important driver of improved competitiveness, productivity and growth potential. This report explores which workplace practices have the strongest links to innovative company behaviour, looking at innovation in the form of new or significantly changed products or processes, new or improved marketing methods, and organisational change.

Europe has gone through significant economic change over the past decade. Businesses have had to manage the challenges posed by the financial crisis, globalisation and a rapidly changing labour market. Eurofound's new report Win-win arrangements: Innovative measures through social dialogue at company level has shown that new challenges do not always require radical new approaches ,  and that innovation can be found in the full implementation of well-established positive workplace practices.

Well-functioning social dialogue is a key component for the successful design and implementation of reforms needed to increase the competitiveness of Europe’s economies and create more jobs. It balances workers’ and employers’ interests and contributes to both economic competitiveness and social cohesion.

The use of supplementary employee reward systems has increased across Europe in recent decades, both in terms of the number of companies using them and the number of employees covered. Supplementary reward systems include performance-related pay, profit-sharing, payment by results and benefits in kind. These forms of remuneration can help to motivate and reward workers and to link pay to company results.

This working paper examines how social dialogue has addressed the impact of the crisis. In order to make reasonable comparisons between countries as diverse as Brazil, China, Japan and the USA it is necessary to take into account the institutional, political, economic and social backgrounds. However, the purpose of this short paper was not to provide a profile of the countries included but rather to identify practices employed by the social partners in dealing with some of the great challenges caused by the crisis.

This report analyses data from Eurofound’s European Company Survey of 2009 to examine the incidence of performance-related pay (PRP) in European establishments and what determines it, with a specific focus on the role of employment relations. Larger establishments, those in foreign ownership, in the financial intermediation and commerce sectors, and those located in some central and eastern European countries are more likely to have a PRP scheme based on the performance of individuals. Across Europe, PRP schemes are more likely to be in place in companies that have employee representation in place.

Across Europe, diverse forms of employee representation structures have developed, providing workers with differing opportunities to voice their interests and to be consulted by their employers directly, at their workplaces, on matters such as economic and human resources developments, working conditions and health and safety measures. This report focuses on the workplace dimension of institutionalised representation of employees. At this level, representation involves only workers of a single undertaking or establishment, and the counterpart on the employers’ side is one single employer rather than an employers’ organisation or group of employers at higher levels of the industrial relations system, such as the sectoral level. The report is based on two sources of information: The findings of the 2009 European Company Survey (ECS); and country fact sheets produced by the national correspondents of the European Industrial Relations Observatory (EIRO).

This background paper provides an overview of recent developments in wage setting in the EU Member States by providing: a brief overview of wage setting mechanisms currently in place within the Member States and Norway; an overview of 'average' collectively agreed pay in 2009 and 2010 for those countries where databases of collective agreements are available; and recent information from Eurofound's network of European correspondents on wage-related collective bargaining in 2011 as well as discussions on the reforms of wage setting mechanisms.