Increasing employee involvement in socially sustainable manufacturing: Two methods for capturing employees’ tacit knowledge to improve manufacturing processes

Abstract

Talented workforce is one of the main strengths in Europe to overcome the economic crisis and address the challenges ahead. The most valuable knowledge the employees have, is tacit and, therefore, hard to utilize in the companies. This paper presents two alternative facilitation methods to capture tacit knowledge related to the manufacturing process, thus allowing the employees participate in activities developing the manufacturing process and the development of positive company culture. The first method focuses on operational tacit knowledge, and the latter method extracts the production related tacit knowledge from the project members. Both of the methods use facilitation to guide the employees through the experience-based learning process and provide support for information and knowledge sharing.