In the structure of today's society, the deck is stacked against the worker. Consider, for example, Tesla. While I'm sure that Tesla engineers are compensated well, Elon Musk is becoming extraordinarily wealthy on the backs of their labor. What role does Mr. Musk serve that merits this enormous disproportionate wealth accumulation?
This system has stifling echos in many respects. Some examples. (A) If you have an excellent idea, for example, to receive funding you must show that it is profitable - often leveraging the full capabilities of your innovation to fully exploit the profit potential, even if you have ethical concerns with this. For example, it may be more difficult to receive funding for a project if you are less amenable to filling it with ads, spyware, and telemetry. (B) If you have an excellent idea, and you do get the funding, this often comes in the form of investment into your company. This means that there are actors influencing the direction of your company you may not agree with, because you needed their money. It's a catch 22. (C) You have an excellent idea, and you develop under the mast of some other company. In this situation, you may be compensated well, but the people who will truly profit, and the people who best leverage it for power, are the people who own the intellectual property to your work. This is not you. It is the corporation you work for. Your hard work is alienated from you.
This is just from an 'innovator' point of view. The claim that capitalism drives innovation runs into this paradox - the people who make money are often not the people driving innovation. And those that make money, even if they had 'innovated', often pull plenty of dirty tricks to rise to the top, rather than ride on their own merits (ie Microsoft vs Linux in the 90's/2000's).
However, there are other concerns. It's not just engineers doing all of the work - there are workers on the ground, well, working. They make the abstract real - not the engineers, not the board members. But these workers get absolutely no say in the direction of their company. It's a dictatorship from the top - if the chief executive says so, it becomes so. Why isn't this process democratic? The one main argument you can make is that a visionary can best guide their enterprise in an authoritarian mode - but this is by far the exception rather than the rule, and gives cover to bad executives making terrible decisions that enrich themselves. Generally though, wouldn't a democratic enterprise still work as well, except without the risk of corruption at the top (or much much more reduced)?
This is the issue of democratizing the workplace, a first step, a first experiment, in socialism.
There are issues with this approach, mostly due to the dangers capitalism itself imposes. First, it would have issues of funding. Private lending facilities may be hesitant to loan to democratized enterprises, or loan on the condition that they again become dictatorships. Here the government can step in, providing a loan in a similar manner that a bank would, except without the concerns of profitability... like how the NSF and NIH funds scientific research. There are still merits you must meet, not anyone just gets a grant, but there isn't any imposed managerial business that your product has to be some profitable thing.
The main issue is giving every worker an equal vote with every other worker in the business. For larger enterprises, this may mean voting for a representative body. Regardless, it doesn't mean everybody has to vote on everything. For a lot of the tedium, it would amount to voting for some manager to handle all of that. It just seems pretty obvious how this is better - it mitigates potential corruption and nepotism, would result in more balanced and fair pay, and more equitable distribution of the profits of an enterprise. It wouldn't go down the gutter either, because more times than not, the workers would higher a manager that has shown a greater aptitude with that sort of stuff.
This also means that when you innovate something, you are given much more power to represent your ownership at the company. If some engineer team has developed the Tesla Model XYZ, then they deserve to have key prominence at that organization because of it, not some showman CEO - they and the workers who make that car are the people that made Tesla Model XYZ, not the showman (of course, the showman does have a role - but this role is often self-fulfilling in capitalism. Their role is demanded by the pressures of capitalism, not by functional necessities to innovate something. Beyond this, the showman still has some role... but it ain't any better than any other role). You are given much more control and ownership over your work. If you want to start your own enterprise, developing something interesting, you apply for a loan from the government (similar to NSF or NIH). Ideally these institutions are well funded enough (unlike current NSF or NIH) so that your case is funded on merits only, not on random competition.
Such experiments have worked when tried out, the most prominent being Mondragon in the Basque country of Spain. Generally such enterprises are called cooperatives or 'co-ops'. The crux here is that the worker is fairly represented. Arguments against one-person, one-vote have to end up gesturing towards some un-measurable sense that the CEO has 'taken more risk' whereas the worker has not. Most of the time this does not make sense - most CEOs got to where they're at by getting voted in by the board, and besides the earliest days of an enterprise, these are usually stable. And often, they go under due to poor management that mishandled the situation, or couldn't evolve fast enough. As a result, workers are left out to dry, with no say in their enterprise as it nose dives into the ground.
This would also mean reducing the capitalist class, the wealthy. These are the people who corrupt the government such that it is more favorable to their business position. They can do this because they have lots of money, and lots of power. By democratizing the workplace, you totally diffuse the power, thus melting away centralized power (ie 'the 1%') which can and does corrupt the government, influencing it to do things the voting people do not want and did not sign up for. Democracy in the workplace means true democracy in government, and vice versa.
This is not nationalization. This is still 'private enterprise', only funded by the government if need be (so that 'profitability' doesn't become an essential goal, and to avoid outsiders derailing your project), and owned by the people doing the work. In a way, this is the pipe dream that small businesses and start-ups have in mind - a few hard workers generating a great thing. Often times though, some people becomes the overpaid, self-regulating manager class, and some people are just exploited workers. There are market pressures for why this happens, and hence the role of the government as a funder. The result would hopefully be enterprises that are owned by the workers of said enterprises. Such workers would be motivated by, well, profit and success, unlike wage-workers who are motivated only to not be fired. In fact, capitalism in this respect isn't the only system which includes 'the profit motive', it's just the one in which the profit motive is a privilege of birth (into the wealthy) and luck (for the few who 'make it'). The 'burger flipper' has no profit motive, but what if they did? How would that possibily make them less of a worker, and more to the point, wouldn't they be far more likely to feel more fulfilled working? Wouldn't that be great?
The problem such enterprises face today is that the traditional capitalist means of funding will work against them. Any institution that is democratized like this cannot be owned in part by people who do no work in it, therefore the traditional funding mechanism of 'investment' doesn't make much sense here. The whole concept of board members (representatives of your investors) doesn't make sense. Of course, it's possible in the interim to have hybrid enterprises (such as in Germany, where workers have to own around half of an enterprise); but such are clearly ridiculous compromises, if you accept the arguments of democratic workplaces. But ultimately without these, how do you get any funding on the scale necessary to launch such an enterprise? It's exceedingly difficult, indicating the suffocating effect of institutions such as investment banks and venture capitalists. They serve a role within capitalism that makes sense, but simultaneously they stifle alternative organizations which are much more democratic. This is why the government would need to play a large role.
These aren't going to be the 'big new thing' that takes over the world economy. They should be tested, at larger and larger scales. But to be tested, they will need a lot of government support, because that is the only institution which can meaningfully help democratic enterprises, without compromising their democratic constitution.