Labour-sponsored funds advance employee participation in corporate governance and management in different ways. The social audits of some funds, for example, commonly include criteria referring to employee participation in most aspects of enterprise and workplace decision-making and other innovations. Some crucial by-products of the audits in this area include greater job flexibility and work reorganization, improved internal communications between managers and workers, more attention to technological change, a training facility, higher quality standards, new human resource management systems, and support for employees balancing family responsibilities.
Indeed, the Crocus Fund takes this process one step further by making these and other goals the explicit function of its organizational effectiveness procedure. This procedure, available to all investee firms, enables the professional design and implementation of high performance techniques, including participative management.
It is worth mentioning at this juncture that the Crocus Fund is the first labour-sponsored fund with a raison d'être to spread industrial and workplace democracy in the context of making job-producing investments. Guided by the history of the Mondragon co-operative system of Spain and ESOPs in the United States, the fund must, under provincial legislation, commit a majority of its assets to investment activity that supports employee participation and ownership. The private mandates of some new funds, such as the First Ontario Fund and the Workers Investment Fund, reflect a similar emphasis.
Some funds that do not use social audits or related measures, such as Working Ventures, may nevertheless have a stated interest in promoting progressive industrial relations, improving dialogue between management and labour, and expressing concern about human resource matters, etc. Such interest is registered by fund officers, formally and informally, over an investment's lifetime.
A critical tool for assisting employee participation and empowerment is economic and financial training. Since the late 1980s, the Fonds de solidarité has committed sizeable resources to an extensive program for preparing workers in investee firms for additional roles and responsibilities. The training is intended to supply workers with knowledge and understanding about the financial state of an enterprise and its market situation. Moreover, it is supposed to raise the level of trust between labour and management by "opening the books" and achieving organizational transparency.
Over time, the scope of training has greatly expanded. In 1993-94, instructors from the fund's Fondation d'education et de formation économique provided seventy courses to approximately 900 workers (that are organized and unorganized, full-time and part-time, blue collar and white collar).Endnote 63 Training is also available to middle and low level managers, such as plant supervisors.