Don’t Ask For Ideas From Your Employees Unless You Are Prepared to Act

The good ‘ol “Suggestion” Box—hang it on the wall with slips of paper and let employees give ideas.  How well has that worked out—for the company?

I’ve worked with clients who had or were in the process of asking employees for their suggestions to improve their job, to make it easier and safer

.  One client told me of their experience from a few months ago.  They revamped their safety committee and wanted to engage all employees in improving the safety cult

ure and practices of the company.  The safety committee along with management asked employees to suggest ideas for new procedures and processes, recommendations for different equipment, and what tools or knowledge they would like to be better able to perform their jobs.  They made a distinct effort to communicate they really wanted ideas throughout the company.  To their surprise, they were bombarded with ideas.  Which was a good thing…However, this client wasn’t expecting this kind of response and the safety committee members was quickly drowning in submissions. Since safety committee members had other full time responsibilities it took the

m weeks to sort through all of the ideas and by that time the enthusiasm from the employees waned to the point where employees started to complain and became more cynical of management and safety than they were before. 

What’s the point of this story?  One point is that improvement, whether it’s regarding safety, lean and ergonomics initiatives or other “innovation” projects require more than just asking for ideas.  It requires a system to make it easy for employees to contribute AND a system for filtering and selecting the right ideas, then prototyping/piloting and ultimately implementing them in the midst of limited resources and competing priorities.  So if you’re going to start an “idea” effort, take the time to develop a system both before and after idea collection.    Another important point to make this idea effort more meaningful and effective is to be sure to focus the criteria and parameters for the submitted ideas.  If you ask a broad question, you will get ideas from left and right field when you really wanted them from center field.  This leads to additional time and effort to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

A final point here is that real improvement requires clear communication with special attention paid to employees’ expectations.  With the righ

t encouragement employees will gladly submit ideas—but they want to know that their thoughtful ideas were given full consideration.  In addition, it is imperative to provide feedback to each employee why or why not their submission was chosen. 

Engaging employees and asking for lots of ideas is vital to improving many work processes.  The key is to have a system in place to manage these ideas otherwise you run the risk of wasting the time and efforts of everyone in involved, but also the content and most importantly the goodwill and genuine willingness to help that comes with it.