Employee participation systems in Spain.: Past, present and future

Despite the importance placed upon new technologies, Continuous Improvement, or generally incremental improvement, without investment and based on the contributions from all members of the company, constitutes a fundamental way to maintain and increase a firm's competitiveness. Within this context, this article analyses the evolution, current situation and future perspectives for systems used by companies in Spain to allow, facilitate or achieve personnel participation in Continuous Improvement. This has been done on the basis of some of the results from a study involving collaboration from 444 companies. Thus, it can be seen that initiatives of this type, although becoming increasingly relevant, do not boast a long tradition, which means there is a considerable number of systems that are very recent and not very structured. Trends existing at an international level that indicate a decline in Quality Circles in favour of Improvement Teams and Suggestion Systems have also been validated.