Annual Report 2009 - IVA

healthy successful companies:
hR work generates value
With more knowledge about personnel
development work, companies can
improve their profitability. This is one
of the conclusions from IVA's Healthy
Successful Companies (3F) project.
more knowledge about personnel development
work can give companies a better
foundation for investment decisions and a
corporate culture that will lead to better
competitiveness, which in turn will increase
overall profitability. This was a conclusion
drawn during the Healthy Successful Companies
(3F) project which was concluded in
autumn 2009 after more than five years of
seminars and network building.
Among other things, the 3f project has
shown how fruitful it is for researchers and
companies to meet and benefit from each
other's expertise. The project has also demonstrated
how important it is for companies
to create networks to more easily benefit
from each other's knowledge and the
knowledge that researchers have to impart.
But 3f has also shown that the research is
under funded. more money for research that
involves cooperation between companies
and behavioural scientists would enhance the
possibilities of building successful corporate
cultures.
during the concluding seminar in november,
Project manager gunn johansson pointed
out that different research areas need to
work together to create a greater knowledge
base. But researchers and companies
also need to work more closely together, as
do different departments within companies.
A major aspect of 3f has been creating networks
and using seminars and field trips to
increase knowledge about what others are
doing in the hR field. A total of 26 companies
and 13 researchers took part in 3f.
A good way of bringing research and companies
closer together, according to gunn
johansson, would be to work with industry
Phds including those working with hR
research. Traditionally, employee satisfaction
and the quality of personnel development
work has been judged by the rates of sickness
absence and staff turnover. But this data
can be completely misleading because it may
be impacted by numerous external factors,
such as the labour market in the area. We
need a better way to measure this, and to
achieve this, more research is needed. And
to benefit from research results, better cooperation
is needed between research-
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ers and companies. These two issues were
the focus of 3f throughout the project. leif
johansson, ceo of AB volvo, was the chairman
of the 3f project. he believes that the
hard-to-define concept of corporate culture
is perhaps the most important factor for
success in the global competition that exists
today. corporate culture is created through
carefully crafted hR work. But leif johansson
also stresses that companies and researchers
need to work more closely together
to develop hR work that is based on the
research results.
A study that was conducted by 3f in cooperation
with lund university confirms
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01 leif johansson
02 gunn johansson
03 henrik frenkel
04 Ramsay Brufer
05 karin Bernadotte
06 carl Bennet
07 leif johansson, maud
olofsson, lennart koskinen
08 johan Adolphson