Most organisations today say they listen to employees. But in practice, “employee voice” often ends at surveys, focus groups, or consultation sessions — useful, but ultimately limited. As I outlined in my previous post, Climbing the ladder: a framework for employee participation in the workplace experience, what truly begins to transform workplace culture is designing with people rather than for them. Beyond better design outcomes, participation changes how people feel — it drives inclusion, trust, and belonging.
The Psychology of Participation
Participation is powerful because it reshapes the relationship between people and their organisation. When employees contribute meaningfully to decisions that affect them, they gain psychological ownership — a sense of this is ours, not this was done to us.
Research bears this out. In the Employee Voice Study (Workplace Intelligence, 2021), 86% of workers said they feel unheard at work, and a third said they would rather quit than stay in a job where their voice doesn’t matter. Conversely, employees who feel heard are five times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best.
“Feeling heard drives a sense of purpose and belonging. By implementing employee feedback, people leaders can create an organizational culture of psychological safety and trust that thrives when its people thrive.”
–Dan Schawbel, managing partner at Workplace Intelligence, which surveyed 4,000 employees and people leaders worldwide for the report.
Other studies echo the link between participation and trust. A 2024 analysis in Heliyon found that promoting genuine employee voice significantly improves trust and culture — the foundation of psychological safety and inclusion.
Evidence in Action: A Co-Design Case Study
A recent study by Markkanen and Herneoja (2024) provides one of the clearest examples of participatory design in action. Conducted in a knowledge-work environment in Finland, the project aimed to redesign office spaces to improve employee satisfaction and performance — but rather than just hiring designers to deliver a solution, the organisation invited employees into every stage of the process.
The co-design process involved semi-structured interviews, visual prompts, and scenario mapping exercises. Participants described their “favourite places” and “daily moments” at work to translate feelings into design requirements for light, colour, materials, privacy, and social interaction.
“…communication and co-design, through the activities, emotions and spatial atmosphere, enable both stakeholders to share the same vision of the designed scenario and create a basis for a more detailed understanding of the design outcome.
The results were striking. Employee satisfaction increased in all four redesigned spaces and participants reported that seeing their ideas realised made them feel “listened to,” which strengthened trust and engagement.
The study demonstrates that co-design engages employees as equal contributors, leading to measurable improvements in satisfaction and a stronger emotional bond with the workplace. By translating subjective feelings into tangible design elements, it offers a replicable model for creating workplaces that people genuinely want to inhabit.
Implications for Practice
The lesson for organisations is that co-design doesn’t require an overhaul, but it does require a mindset shift and a commitment to integrating a much broader range of perspectives and needs. Start with a single pilot area or policy; bring employees into structured workshops; prototype, test, and adapt. Co-design reveals tacit emotional needs that less in-depth forms of consultation can overlook. Close the loop by showing how their input informed the outcome — because the moment people see their stamp on the result, trust deepens.
References:
- The Employee Voice Study (2021). Workplace Intelligence. https://workplaceintelligence.com/the-employee-voice-study
- Issah Iddrisu, Bawah Mohammed (2024). Investigating the influence of employee voice on public sector performance: The mediating dynamics of organizational trust and culture. Social Sciences & Humanities Open, Volume 10, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2024.101096. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590291124002936)
- Markkanen, P., & Herneoja, A. (2024). Constructing a theory-informed workplace design framework: co-design case study for knowledge work environment satisfaction improvement. Building Research & Information, 52(8), 870–886. https://doi.org/10.1080/09613218.2024.2372024
