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How To Encourage Workers To Suggest Innovation?
An anonymous reader writes "The software company where I work has an Innovation and Knowledge program that encourages workers to provide ideas for new products and suggestions to improve the work place, productivity or welfare. The ideas and suggestions are evaluated by a board that decides whether they should be implemented or not. The group of workers with more ideas participates in a raffle to receive a prize. I would like to know what other programs people have seen like this and how they differ. What is the best way to encourage workers to suggest new products to be made / researched by the company?"
They'll also suggest a whole bunch of other, probably not so helpful stuff.
That was easy.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
weaponised innovation i call it
prepare the survey weasels.
Whatever you do, discard all first suggestions. They're all just wannabe first posters.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
I think first companies need to make employees feel comfortable criticizing their superiors.
Cash bonuses, salary increase, and royalty upon successful product would do it. Of course, it would depend on the definition of "success".
I think it's important to define what you are looking for.
At my company, we had a very similar project for a long time. I always thought innovation meant some incredible break through, or new product line. Turns out, some innovations that were accepted were changes to our coffee vendor, and tests for our new development folk (standard practice in my office, but considered innovative at one of our other sites.)
Had I know what the quality bar was at the beginning of the project, I would have submitted all kinds of stuff. As it was, I was just waiting for a really great idea.
Google let's their employees work on their own interesting side projects for 20% of their time. It's resulted in some of their best innovations. The employee is responsible for keeping the project up to date and Google owns it, obviously.
What motivates people is recognition.
Some companies mandate that a certain percentage of their employee's time should be dedicated to innovation. I know one that does is J. M. Smuckers (I believe). They mandate 15% of their time. Those who want to innovate can, and those who don't, get some time off, which improves their morale. Win-Win.
It's all fun and games till someone divides by 0. Then it's hilarious.
Failing that...more money.
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
In capitalist America, Innovation suggests you!
Homer: [watching vending machine] Apple... Apple... Apple... come on, Candy Bar... [looking at an apple in the machine] Hey, I know you! You're that first apple I didn't want! That sinks it! I'm really gonna get let them have it this time! [writing on a notepad next to the suggestion box] No more apples in the vending machine PLEASE!! Then Mr. Burns gets it and reads it in a demeaning voice "Oh, don't worry, there will be plenty of apples in the vending machine."
God spoke to me.
What is the best way to encourage workers to suggest new products to be made / researched by the company?
"Ever since the Phoenicians invented money, there has been only one answer to that question." -- Clarence Darrow
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Your question is a little confusing - It's not clear to me whether you're asking for a mechanism for employees to make suggestions to 'improve the workplace' ("Gee it sure would be nice to have a ping pong table!") or a mechanism for them to make suggestions for feature improvements ("We should build a Linux version of your application!").
If it's the former, be careful. Generally, employee suggestions for workplace improvements cost money (real or perceived), be it "pizza Friday," a ping pong table or better telecommuting policies. Unless you have buy-in from upper management for a genuine $$$ budget for 'morale' these requests just to into a black hole, so why bother providing the mechanism? Make sure you have a budget first.
If it's the latter, I've never worked for a company yet that didn't have a shortage of employee suggestions of good ideas for a given product. Sales is full of suggestions. The tricky part is having a mechanism to evaluate & estimate those suggestions, build business cases and all that tricky stuff...
Ideas are easy to come by, frankly they are pretty much worthless.
If you want innovation, you have to give them time to somewhat implement their ideas on their own. The implementation will require them to further refine their thoughts and work out some of the kinks, and interesting projects will inspire others to build off it. Furthermore, they have to be able to work on whatever they want, any hoop they have to jump through, anyone who has to decide if its worth other than themselves, while stifle creative spirit.
Give employees half a day a week in which they should work on any side project they want (like google). Monthly, have a lunch meeting where people can discuss cool things they've been doing, ideas that came from it, etc.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
How To Encourage Workers To Suggest Innovation?
1) Pay "workers" for each suggestion.
2) Ensure that each "worker" is made aware that the "worker" owns the ideas he submits to the company, and that the company will offer to license the ideas from the "worker" if Management deems the ideas "good enough" to implement
3) Ensure that the following are NOT offered as incentives: "raffles", "prizes" and (like one company I worked for offered, the "opportunity" to win the privilege of having breakfast with a Manager). This should be common sense for ANYBODY who has studied Management, the Social Sciences, Psychology, etc. But unfortunately the type of people who get into Human Resource Management don't usually have the brightest light bulbs.
Take cues from George Westinghouse instead of Thomas Edison. Edison screwed over Tesla who then took his genius to Westinghouse who then won the war of the currents.
Do they raffle off other benefits, like health care?
It has already been said -- if you want something of value from your employees, pay them for it. Thats how the whole "work" thing works.
Either pony up the cash or let them use the time they are already paid for to think about how to innovate.
It's very demoralizing when leaders encourage employees to proffer innovative ideas, and then basically ignores them. Or equally bad, shows favoritism in which ones are acted upon.
I can't imagine anything that would shut down employee participation faster than a sense that management isn't actually willing to act on them.
Use Lean to encourage them.
and am quickly ignored or ridiculed by management.
Then six months later when they realize I was right, suddenly it's -their- idea, and they want -me- to implement it to save their floundering bacon.
Meanwhile, had they just let me do my damn job and implement the idea at the beginning, they could still have taken all the glory, and saved themselves a lot of egg on the face, and made the work environment actually somewhat enjoyable or rewarding for me.
Instead, I get pissed on up front, pissed on when their pants are on fire, and pissed on when I can't help but say, "I TOLD YOU SO."
Zapp! The Lightning Of Empowerment: How To Improve Quality, Productivity, And Employee Satisfaction by William C. Byham, Jeff Cox, Jeff Cox (With), Jeff Cox (Preface by)
-- Michael
(not an anonymous coward, just lazy)
The biggest deterrent to getting ideas is to ignore advice. If you want to encourage employees to come up with new ideas make them feel like they are seriously listened too.
It's 3:40pm on a Friday afternoon, I'm going to go innovate from home :)
you want to profit from my innovation? sounds like you're giving me part of the company. otherwise you're getting a 9-5 brainless drone, just like you pay me for.
If I come up with an idea that the company patents, give me partial ownership of the patent. Otherwise I'm keeping my mouth shut until long after my contract expires. There is no incentive when I know the company is making millions and I only get a new iPod.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Encourage them with lots of bright banners, exhorting them to new heights of productivity, teamwork, synergy, and don't forget safety!
They simply need to ask themselves: Is this good for the company?
Money.
Yes, for 99% of us, the answer IS that simple. It really doesn't matter of you make propellers, pizza, or porno, most people know that their idea is likely going to generate the company upwards of millions of dollars. Freaking kills me that 99% of the time, the inventor is left holding the jelly-of-the-month club membership as a "token of appreciation".
Money. Real money. Your company is going to make it. It's only fair you get a decent cut of that.
Many companies (like eBay) take ownership of "inventions" made at work, so the best way to get employees to volunteer such inventions is to actually pay them what it's worth.
Not that doesn't stop people from volunteering practical inventions or directions the company should go eg "stop punishing our members for X", but usually big companies that didn't hire people specifically for inventing things, seem to not give a crap about any invention made by staff, and would sooner axe the employee for spending time working on the invention. Even if the invention would have had a net performance increase.
If you are considering the "money" suggestion you should probably keep the quirks of human psychology in mind. Excluding the stone-cold-homo-economicus types(who are fairly rare in practice), most people can be motivated for almost no money, or a good deal of money; but often won't be motivated by just a little money.
A lot of people voluntarily do valuable work, or come up with valuable ideas, for essentially no money, because there is something else that hooks them. Think Free Software people, various sorts of volunteers, people who do more than they need to at work, and so on. People will also, obviously, be motivated by large amounts of money(large being a relative measure).
The middle ground, though, can be a bad idea. People think about economic and non-economic activity differently. Somebody who would submit a linux kernel patch for free might well be insulted if they were offered rentacoder rates for their work. Somebody who will voluntarily suggest a valuable process improvement just because he takes pride in his work would probably not be pleased by a toaster. This is a somewhat interesting piece on the subject.
Either you create an environment that gives people the social warm and fuzzies(this includes paying decent money; but relies on social factors) or you give people real rewards to motivate them. Nobody on a professional salary is going to innovate for condescension and peanuts. They'll innovate because the environment is good and they want to, or for real money.
This was the first thing I thought of. Too bad being pulled into the bosom of a hot chick in a leather or latex power suit and having your hair stroked will never be a common method of promoting innovation. Sigh.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
The US Air Force has the IDEA program that allows anyone who works for them suggest changes to anything. If that change ends up saving money, they cut a check for a percentage of that savings to the person/group who submitted the change.
This is a field of research usually called "Intrapreneurship". The company 3M is famous for being successful with it. Google it to find some general rules about how to be successful with it.
Any thought or suggestion that has not already been approved by management is greeted with a hammer, usually not padded, much like the well loved game Whack-a-Mole.
"The way you think it is may not be the way it is at all." St. Oran
i'd go out and start my own damn company, then interview my former boss for a position
ideas are power in the world of technology. asking your employees to give them to you for a fucking raffle (seriously?) is like buying the island of manhattan for trinkets. if my idea is good enough, i deserve a reward better than something akin to an "employee of the month" plaque at mcdonalds
but don't worry, you'll still get plenty of ideas. all sparse, vague, and minor: you get what you pay for
if you want a serious reply to your question, if you actually want good ideas that actually offers serious enough implications for your company's future OFFER THEM STOCK AND AN EQUITY STAKE
not a fucking raffle. frankly, your quesiton is insulting
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Economist has its annual Innovation Awards (since 2002). Besides listing the several categories it gives selection criteria. What's not directly applicable to answering the question should at least serve as a parallel example. The recipients are to be individuals rather than corporate, even though the innovation from those individuals may result in a corporate entity.
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10676339
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Come up with something that makes the company millions (or maybe more) and there ought to be a rewards program that specifies that once costs get recouped, the inventor gets a bit of that - fraction of a percent is fine - for as long as it makes this large amount, and whether or not he is then still at that company or not. That will tend to get really significant ideas brought to the table, where knowing that most you can get is a thanks from your unit manager and not a peep from anyone else, tends to keep you from passing ideas on that are not directly in your work assignments. Few experiences are more annoying than having your idea praised, anonymously, in some all hands meeting, remarking how many hundreds of millions it saved the company, and not getting a peep about it at any time later (nor any recognition in your annual review, ever), even though it was your effort that got it to be implemented as well.
An idea for a software program is not unlike an idea for a book, a poem, or a song. I suggest that if a company *really* wants innovation, that they offer 1% royalties that are not negated by loss of employment. That way, a good software developer may, after 10 or 30 years of coding, actually be able to retire.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Our company is running a program where all employees will be split into groups of 5-10 to hold idea generating sessions.
One cool thing they coached those of us facilitating these sessions is that it's REALLY easy to kill good ideas before they ever get started.
An exercise that illustrated this was called 'Yes but, No but'. We split up into pairs - first was 'No but'. One person had an idea for our Christmas party, and the other had to constantly find things wrong with the idea. It was really easy to find real reasons why an idea would fail.
The second part was 'Yes but'. This time, the first person shared their idea for the Christmas party, and the second person had to agree with the idea and think about ways that it could work and how to extend it. They weren't allowed to shoot it down.
If you have an idea generating session with people who always try to shoot ideas down, they can die before they really mature from 'thoughts' into 'ideas'.
I did several things recently that improved my company's capability to produce and reduced my budget expenses. Do you know what I got?
I got to keep my budget, so now I can spend it on more things that will increase output.
Unlike some places, where I'd just lose the extra money and thus have to be stupid to try. I never understood that logic.
1. Respect their ideas and consider them.
2. If you implement an idea, reciprocate the value with appreciation and acknowledgment for everyone involved.
3. Follow up even on ideas you don't implement and express genuine appreciation for someone taking time out of their day and give you a free piece of advise.
4. Make it safe for people to suggest ideas that may be contrary to what upper management feels is right, convenient or is otherwise uptight about.
Reviewed by a board, and then maybe, they get a prize after their name is drawn? I see that as total bullshit, treating your employees as children. And thinking you are not, which makes it worse.
Why do I suspect that when you say "prize" you don't mean a million dollars in 20 $50k installments over 20 years? Maybe something like a $10 gift card to Starbucks? Am I close?
How about this: give cash - or stock, not options, stock - to people who's ideas are implemented? Straight up: you have a good idea not within your direct job responsibility, and we implement it, you get cash.
Seriously, I'll give you a million dollar idea for the chance to win an ePromos deskclock that will mysteriously break in about 4 days. Who could ask for a better reward?
Is it just me or does anyone else reading this think that the poster of the question has no interest in seriously rewarding their workers for going the extra mile? A raffle? A chance to maybe win some "prize" after your workers already put in the extra effort? You must be kidding me.
Frankly, if that's your idea of a reward system you'd be better off not asking and hoping someone in your organization offers up ideas without being asked (or expecting a chance at a reward for that matter). It would probably be better for over all working conditions. I can only imagine that your current "reward" systems breeds contempt among your employees.
<SARCASM>Oooh! A raffle for a prize! I might get a stuffed animal! I hope it's a kitty...<SARCASM>
The federal government can award an employee 10% of money saved for a money saving idea (up to a limit). If your company's incentive program is worse than the government's, it's time to polish up the resume.
But really, recognizing your smart employees and having enough respect to listen to them and actually consider what they say, and then giving them the resources they need to pursue their idea is the best incentive you can give. Promoting the clueless is the worst.
The OP's scenario makes me think the whole thing is management's idea of morale boosting and they don't really care what anybody suggests.
I'm sorry. Did you miss that? It's MONEY! Real money, significant money. Fair money. NOT "Here's a $1000 dollar bonus for that great idea, kid." That's not a bonus. It's an insult. If that happens once in your organization, you'll never see another innovative idea of any worth. FYI, that *kid* can get funding, develop the idea independently, cover the whole thing up in an offshore corporation and sell online, and the company he works for will never see a dime. If the company wants a cut, they'll have to make it easier and/or more profitable for the kid to give them the idea. All the rest is pop-psych nonsense. There is no loyalty either from or to the organization. There is *nothing* but "Money talks. BS walks."
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The group of workers with more ideas participates in a raffle to receive a prize.
If I was at your company my first thought would be "Oh boy! A chance at being in a group that has a chance of winning a prize! Where do I sign up?"
Come on. Who is going to be enthusiastic about that?
If you want real results, reward everyone who comes up with an idea that gets used. And make it substantial. If you give out a $5 gift certificate, then you're going to get a slew of five dollar ideas.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
If the board approves, the employee must receive some instant bonus, and a percentage of whatever profits may be obtained from implementation of the idea or development of the idea. Easy to say, but this will be very tough to implement. But for real innovation, there really has to be something worthwhile for the employee to be gained. Like Google has their pool of new ideas which they fund and the time spent on it is included in each employee's paycheck.
Real men read Slashdot articles at -1, bottom up.
I think the best thing a company can do is make the employee sign a contract that everything he thinks of belongs to the company. Doesn't matter if he thinks of it at work, or on the way to/from, or during Sunday School. And the inventor must never ever divulge or utilize his own idea in any context, except at work (if the employer decides to use it).
If that's not a sure-fire recipe for employees giving you their best ideas, then I don't know what is.
I wouldn't bother unless I'm seeing some direct non-trivial benefit. A pat on the back or public recognition without that is almost worthless to me.
I'd say treating people like humans! Where I work people are just machines. The boss could care less. I wouldn't offer a new product idea.
you need to make the process that happens AFTER suggestions are submitted transparent to the employees.
If they get the feeling that the idea box is a black hole, with no feedback at all on what ideas are being looked at or why some of them aren't such good ideas (or are good but impractical, etc) they won't bother making the effort.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
You will not get good suggestions until people see some ideas put into play and getting recognition for it.
I've been at this place for 3 years and have been spewing out ideas to make things better. Sometimes I get shot down but many times I get the "that a great idea" kudo. But guess what: NOTHING HAPPENS from it.
Now I just don't bother suggesting anything and I'm planning to move on before I go postal. If upper MGMT doesn't give a damn, why should I?
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
MONEY!!!!!
Universities pay royalties to those who develop innovation. That is the only universal way to keep people from hoarding their ideas.
I would add one additional motivator and that is if an idea is dismissed by the company, the employee retains all rights to it - and the employer will maintain some confidentiality of the unused idea...
In too many companies, the technical direction is driven not by technical leads, but by MBAs in middle-management. If your individual contributors have to run their innovations by a non-technical manager, your organization is broken, IMO. If you empower your employees not just to "suggest innovation" but to actually innovate, you're far better off. This means putting technical people in charge of setting technical direction, and accommodating an individual's work that was not strictly prescribed at the start of the quarter.
The whole thing about submitting suggestions to a committee reeks of corporate bureaucracy, which is the antithesis of innovation. If you're going to do it like this, do it right and get upper management to buy into the whole idea. The last company I worked for did the whole suggestion-box-to-a-committee thing, but after a few months, just started dumping everyone's suggestions into the bit bucket. This is worse than not having a culture or process for encouraging innovation in the first place.
I worked for Toyota as an engineering intern at a manufacturing plant. At Toyota, ideas for improvement get rapidly evaluated and implemented.
This is rewarding and the person/people who device the improvements are rewarded. When people see they are being taken seriously they will be altogether more cooperative and helpful. The problem comes when their suggestions are ignored. In my opinion that is inconsiderate/demeaning; even worse than not even asking for their input at all!
Some form of defined ongoing benefit...
This would really only work for new products/services as opposed to improving existing things I think, but I suggest a new product, with my help the company builds it, I should get some percentage of the profits of said product... If its not profitable, I don't make anything extra.
I have at least 10-20 ideas of new things that should be built at any one time... Sure not all of them are germane to my current employer's business, but at least 5 of them are. Will I give them to this company? No, not unless something like the above is implemented to reward me. 2 or 3 of them I've already implemented in my spare time with my own resources and outside of my contract of employment entirely.. I could turn over a nearly finished product...
With improvements to existing products or services, it would be near impossible to measure the "profitability" of the improvement, so maybe a one time bonus of $100-300 for each improvement that is accepted and implemented.
Why not try NOT having them sign a contract that says the company owns every idea that they have for the rest of their lives? Instead, any an all ideas should belong to the creator of the idea, unless they sell the rights to the company (this should be the employee's choise). The company can then evaluate the idea and if they use it, they have to pay a fee to the employee, plus 10% of any profits (if any) generated.
For motivation, replies are basically falling into two categories: money and recognition. I'd like both, but either is fine.
For the folks that say recognition is corporate-speak for no money and cash is king, where did Linux come from? For that matter, where is money to be made putting effort into an insightful /. comment?
But your #1 barrier, as an employer trying to spark employee innovation, is yourself.
No gets any satisfaction seeing their great idea die. There's no money or recognition in getting your suggestion lost in committee.
My current employer talks about wanting employees to take initiative, but to get anything done I'd have to get sign off from half a dozen managers, squeeze a couple hours of meetings each week into an already over-loaded schedule, kill half an acre of rain forest in paper for reports and project plans and risks assessments, and so on and so on.
Forget innovation, I'd like to fix bugs. For example, my app has a data file we send over to another app. We occassionally send over duplicate records, causing the other app to choke on the import. This issue pre-dates me joining the group, it is well know and years old.
My suggestion? On the query to create the data file, use "select distinct" in place of "select." Presto, no more duplicates.
For reasons I still don't understand, this resolution is not acceptable. So we have hours of meetings, and expend resources on containment of the issue after the fact, and never address the root cause.
For the most part, employees want to do a good job. More than that, they really do want that feeling of accomplishment. An employer, the best thing you can do is get out of the way.
The Wallys of the world aren't born, they are made.
The parent seems like it is asking for product improvements and break room changes in the same suggestion box. That seems like a bad idea. For general work place improvements, think of buying all your employees 1 GB USB flash drives. 5 years ago that might have been both ahead of the curve work place improvement and morale booster. Now, you'll get an app that requires USB key flash drives to log in and you'll need to provide them anyway. It all comes down to money. We've been wanting to provide 80 USB key chains for ages. It's only lately when the price has fallen to $5 for 2 GB that we've got 25 extra to hand around. That was a single supervisor spending less than $150 where we can't get 80*$5=400 pushed through.
It's little things like that which are actual work place improvements. We've got several supervisors with Windows Mobile cell phones that connect using active sych. Gosh that's a workplace improvement that supervisors mostly love. It's all a money thing though. If it was cheap, they'd want everyone to have 'em.
You know the biggest quality of life computing change that I've experienced here since 2002? The switch from 14"-17" CRTs to 19+" LCDs. They've all got DVDROM/CDRW combo drives now that they didn't have then. That's not a big quality of life change when half the supervisors still e-mail me to burn their CDs for them though.
You know the second biggest quality of life change that I liked? A leased network copier. It scans in color and e-mails them it in pdf. It prints in laser BW. I hated scanning their crap more than burning their CDs, and they apparently can use the copier and select their name in the address book.
Now if they can all just learn to use excel so I'm not the only one around here doing number crunching for the YER. (Heck, I think it'll be April before I get YER for 2008 numbers from some people.)
easy, just give them $200 if their idea is picked. If that means you start getting too many crappy ideas, make each idea cost you $1, or even $.25 Well below the cost of the prize, but enough to make people at least think twice before putting in the 'mail delivered by hang glider' idea.
Keep a couple easy HR girls that flirt entirely too much, and leave them with a date with Yatori in HR. Asian girl makes some totally inappropriate advances after dinner...
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Also, I'm sure if companies stopped threatening to lay them off, that probably wouldn't hurt either.
Make them a partner in their idea. Pay them a percentage of the royalties, put them in charge of the project. Give them the feeling that since it was their idea, that their creativity is not being used and tossed aside once the money rolls in. Of course, if it fails, then it's their deal...
Nah. The only reason for this article is to trick your employees into giving you ideas that you can't come up with for yourself. You get paid all this money for being an idea person, and yet, you've got to farm your hired help for ideas. Pathetic, really. The only intention here is for you to profit tremendously on someone else's creativity.
It all depends on where you work and how open they are to ideas and innovation. Some places simply don't encourage it and don't want to here it. I usually check careervote.com and other sites when I'm researching companies. Although these days I'm also checking to see if they're likely to lay me off in a month.
Why is approval necessary? Why can't if an employee has a good idea he can't just do it without approval?
The persons who are often best able to judge whether an innovation is a good idea are those directly working in the area and often those at the bottom of the hierarchy. Forming a board of non experts to evaluate innovation is probably the best way to kill innovation. If you want to encourage innovation think about decentralizing your decision making.
"Come up with a really useful, innovative idea or we're filing for Chapter 11!"
- February 13th SiriusXM Board Meeting
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Seriously, all of the responses here are good, but they address the symptom of your problem, not the problem.
Your problem is that you don't have a culture of innovation. You need to create a culture of innovation, to do that you need to fix some things.
1) You are doing performance reviews wrong. Don't feel bad, almost everyone is. Fix that.
2) Your workers think that innovation is optional and something that is a bonus. Innovation is an expected part of your job, and if you are not innovating you are not doing your job.
Grishnahk says, "Any innovative ideas I come up will be kept hidden until I'm out of here."
You need to convince people that the only way that they will succeed is if the company succeeds and you need to reward people when they do their job well. (See point #1) The Grishnahks of the world will constantly seek the workplace where mediocrity is tolerated. There are 500,000 new employees looking for jobs from last month alone. Get rid of Grishnahk.
3) Openness. People need to know that you got rid of Grishnahk and why. People need to know that you gave Mark's job to John because John worked harder and contributed more.
Do not tolerate substandard work. Expect innovation as a fundamental core of each persons job, not as a volunteer opportunity. Reward hard work with recognition.
*Portrayal of Grishnahk as a slacker was from a single statement and used for illustrative purposes only.
During my studies I've learned that various cultures encourage or discourage innovation. So the morale is - lay off everyone, employ Japanese. ;)
That's got to be the most pathetic incentive scheme I've ever heard of! A chance at a raffle ticket?!!!
How about a scheme where:
1) The employee actually benefits (radical, huh?) if their new product idea is adopted and,
2) The employee doesn't lose out by suggesting new product ideas that the company isn't willing to adopt
So, for example:
1) Large cash bonus or stock options for any new product idea the company wants to develop, and
2) Company reverts rights to undeveloped product ideas back to employee
If you want workers to innovate, pay them to do it.
Don't read management self-help books; talk to folks who did it in your field:
Information? Google (at one time), Small Manufacturing: Lincoln Electric (recent history), Automotive: Saturn, HMMA
Wages:
If I'm an Engineer whose job is to create and implement profitable designs, pay me a competitive rate.
Bounties:
If I'm a line worker whose job is to put parts in machines and slap two buttons--and I come up with an idea that saves/earns the company money, give me 5%.
If I save the company $20,000, I get a grand.
If I save the company a million bucks, I get $50K.
Profit Sharing/employee ownership:
If the company makes money, we all get some.
Or, when you hire me, offer me part of my salary in company stock options at 90% of FMV, with a rolling holding period of 5 years.
Offer that (with the same restrictions) to EVERYONE--CEO to line workers. Make it less attractive to fire all the workers, then take the money and run.
Morale:
If you shit on people, you lose the use of their imagination.
They'll still show up to collect their paycheck, and they'll be JUST productive enough to keep their jobs, but that's all.
DON'T weasel out of rewarding your line workers by defining saying "innovation is everyone's job" unless you're going to start paying those line workers according to their new job description.
These are the guys that watch the process all day every day; they KNOW where the waste is.
Don't slap the innovator in the face by capping the bounty. Why is $50K too much to reward somebody if they come up with a million dollar idea? They just saved you a million bucks!.
Keep your profit-sharing simple and transparent. Your employees are not likely to all be accountants, but if the profit sharing each year is a hundred bucks, they'll know it's BS.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
If I have a good idea, I'm not going to tell my employer about it. I'm going to develop it on my own, at home, and patent the sucker myself. Why should I let the company in on it?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
That's a great article. As with all management things, the simple breadth of motivating factors for people tend to make any given technique invalid for a significant portion of the group.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It's 4:53pm on a Friday afternoon, and my team was informed that everyone had to be here from 8:00am to 5:00pm every day without fail, regardless of what work needed doing or how negatively one's home life might be impacted. In 7 minutes I'm going to go not innovate from home :(
This on top of every "hey, let's catch up with the rest of the industry and move into the 21st Century - they're doing stuff this way now for a reason" innovative suggestion being shot down (and I mean with such prejudice that termination was threatened at least once).
A little respect for professional experience (in contrast with "nobody is smarter than the supervisor"), and coupled with a little financial incentive, can go a long way.
I like to innovate. Giving me room to really can pay off.
Oops, it's 5:00pm now. Bye.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
One bug tracker, for bugs and new features, for all users internal and external. That includes developers.
If you have too many ideas, you'll need to filter them. The only thing that matters is how efficiently you can filter them by merit. I don't believe that preventing end users, and certainly not internal people!, from accessing the bug tracker is an efficient way to filter by merit.
It's my experience that if a company needs an innovation scheme then it's generally doing something pretty wrong. Innovation should be part of the standard job spec, not some bolt on side issue special scheme that you do for x hours per week.
If you want more innovation forget about a special scheme. Work instead on providing time and places (virtual and real) where people can talk. Work on getting your management to allow individuals to experiment, to play with new technologies, even when they're maybe not directly related to what the individual has been employed to do.
Kodak had a program to give 10% of the savings to the company to the idea submitter. They didn't have a shortage of ideas. They did have a problem with people submitting ideas for common sense fixes instead of just implementing the common sense fix.
What makes me laugh is how mamnagers love to criticise underlings for their lack of initiative, yet the moment an underling shows any managers instantly assume they're after their jobs.
The idea of a board over-seeing all ideas will be IMHO the show-stopper.
Not that I'm a smart haxzor, but I've seen some really-really smart people, and I've seen that the managers of the really smart people often don't realize the genius they have working for them.
Hence, when a really smart haxzor wants to develop some interesting "new idea", the roadblocks get thrown up because the managers don't understand the need or potential of "new idea".
I think all managers of a company which wants to try this needs to watch Michael Cringley's documentary "Triumph of the Nerds", not to be confused with "Pirates of Silicon Valley", or even "Revenge of the Nerds"... TOTN is interviews with people who worked in Palo Alto Research Center, or knew Gates, Jobs, Woz and others that were the silicon revolution. They talk about successes, failures, and things that PARC rejected which became success for others up to a decade later.
Such as PARC engineers had a PC that could print a document which looked just like what you saw on the screen... Great you say, MS has been doing this since the 80's (1)... PARC stifled this in 1968, almost 2 decades before MS could do decent printing.
Of course PARC computers had a mouse, 10 years before commercially available PC's had a mouse.
1. For those who weren't there, PCs word processing was really crappy until the late 80's. For instance, your word processing software did not tell your printer what font size to use, tab length, or margins. Which does not sound like much, but if you set type for size 8 font, and your printer printed in size 10 font, your document comes out not looking like what you saw on the screen.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
Give them a piece of the action, and they'll fall all over themselves to come up with good ideas.
One percent of the gross ought to do nicely.
Or one percent of net, if you don't do Hollywood accounting.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I think I post anon..
No special motivation is needed. If employees believe they are being listened to, they'll suggest ideas. Everybody has ideas about how to do things better, and everybody loves to talk about them.
I have no idea what the committees and prizes are about, but you may be sure your employees are getting a mixed message. If they are not producing ideas, it is because there is some other dynamic going on that is inhibiting them. You need to find out what that is and remove it, not fiddle around trying to oppose it with raffles and "recognition."
By the way, there's nothing so demotivating as seeing the people who won the plaques and the gift certificates get laid off.
For example, perhaps your company has a culture in which employees are told what to do instead of what goals are to be achieved, and punished if they achieve the desired goals in a manner different than prescribed. Employees quickly learn that procedure is everything, and that nobody wants to know a better but different way from getting from point A to point B.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I was reading a Robert Allen / Mark Victor Hansen book on a similar subject. Their suggestion - ask the employees.
I've just now started a process where I am going to elicit one suggestion from each of my staff during the weekly meeting. I forewarned them of it, and explained it will be open and fair communication. (I also told some of my more verbose employees that it only needs to be one suggestion.)
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Royalties. If an employee comes up with a product that makes (or saves) a bunch of money for your firm, give them a few percentage points of the resulting profits.
For every patent we file at our company, we get a nice brass and wood plaque. We also get to keep working here and during this economy is a pretty sweet deal.
Any given employee will spend 30% of the time not doing serious work anyway, so why not ease the guilt for this and replace it with something useful? Allow employees to use 10% of their time to do cool things for the company. It seems to work for google, even if they don't usually spend as much time as they're theoretically allowed to.
Listen to them when they volunteer their ideas. People don't just come up with bright ideas on your watch. Similarly, people don't bother sharing their ideas when management has its collective head up its collective asshole, which is frequently the case.
There was a recent 8-page letter discovered that showed an unusual attitude/relationship between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Apparently they were more involved with one-another than previously thought, even suggesting some of their disputes were staged. It is currently available at an online auction site for over $300K american dollars. I find it verry disgusting that scientists would conspire in such a way as proclaim the advancement of man to be an element of commerce instead of science. The URL was realy long, so try to click rather than copy the URL; The first 4 pages of that auction can be read this directory of an auction firm on Texas http://www.galleryauctions.com/auctions/p7lsm_img_4/...
actions depend on the circumstances
1. did you tell anyone the idea?
if Y you are already screwed, else go to 2.
2. is the idea closely related to your job?
if Y then its probably best to pipe up as you will never convince a court its not property of the employer, otherwise go to 3.
2. can the idea go to market quickly/cheaply?
if N you need funding. carefully prod some venture capitalists, university or government innovation types. dont explain too much and never disclose anything without NDA. if Y go to 3.
3. is it patentable?
if N someone will steal the idea. period. if Y get a patent application in and go to 4.
note that the filing date may be used against you by your employer later, so it might pay to quit just before you file.
4. do you have the right people?
if N do careful research and get the right team ready to roll provisional on funding, patent approval etc. else go to 5
5. quit job
keep ALL correspondence. date everything. take advice. ensure clear space between your contract and your new venture. if there is value in the invention your old employer will make your life suck in a big way. having powerful backers can help.
putting the intellectual property into a limited company that you do not control (friends & family as codirectors with you the major shareholder) can help too. get directors insurance. lots of it. and a legal opinion before you let loose.
the court will assess, amongst other things:
(a) your invention's relationship with your old job role
(b) when you quit
(c) when you filed your patent or incorporation
(d) whether you control what happens to it
(e) your diligence in ensuring your old company's interests were looked after during your tenure (and after to a reasonable extent)
so if i worked for ibm as a chip designer, invented a new chip, pentented it, started a company and then quit IBM then I would be screwed.
if i worked for ibm as a chip designer, invented a new mouse trap, quit, patented, incorporated then I would be probably be OK.
If you use my idea on how to reward your employees for their ideas do I get a shot in your raffle too?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I work for a large company that has a huge innovation programme. We are expected put in at least 1 idea per month to participate in Profit Share.
But I will only provide minor ideas or improvements.
For major money-making ideas, I will keep those to myself.
This is because I know that I am not going to be well compensated for it if I is successful. At most I may get some movie tickets for it, as oppose it keeping it for myself, where I could go out there in the world of business and be well compensated for my success, if only I was more business savvy.
All it would take is a guarantee that if the major idea is successful, then the idea is still the property of the company, but I am entitled to 10% of the first year's profits. - Hey maybe I could put that in as my next idea.
I think it is very simple.
1) Make them coowners.
Part of the salary should be in company shares.
It is important that it is not in stock options.
2) Give them time to work on there own ideas.
20% like Google is fine.
This gives them both the encouragement and the
opportunity to invent for the company.
my company offer £1000 per patent granted great as long as you can persuade the incumbant conversative engineer community to (a) understand what you're proposing (b) understand the benefits (c) adopt in their next products (d) be willing to sell your soul politically within the company for the next couple of years to even get the relevant people to consider the idea Any ideas for getting around that company culture? :-)
The WWW approach would seem tailor made for this.
1. First W: Whiskey!
2. Second W: Women!
3. Third W: Whips!
4. ?????
5. Profit! or at least a party that will be the talk of the office for years!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
nuff said.
I think the first thing you need to do is take care of your workers and make it safe for them to share their ideas.
A few cultural obstacles that will spoil it
1. Making them feel owned
Nabbing a great idea from an employee and then showing them no thanks for it, really kills initiative. Make sure they fell the company values them as a member of the team, and not just a golden goose that can be milked for all its worth before being sent to the foie gras factory.
Case in point:
Employee shares great improvement for labor efficiency, then gets laid off as unneeded because his position became obsolete. Perhaps bad strategy on the employee, but also complete disregard on the company. Strategy battles are divisive enough intercompany, they are sure as HELL not needed inside one.
2. Making them feel threatened
Often times especially with traditional hierarchies, "new ideas" are seen as a challenge to authority, as in how DARE a mere peon would even think of one-upping his boss by coming up with something his boss didn't already sanction by coming up with first.
Make a culture where a boss and his subordinates can be peers. Good amicability really makes good task grease.
Put yourself in your employee's shoes and make sure they have no reason to NOT contribute.
Once that's taken care of, make sure you actually ask for ideas.
At my last job, which ended yesterday, I couldn't even get them to implement plain common sense. For example, their backup plan for the database was to dump it on the VM and copy it to another VM on the same system. WTF! They hired me as their system admin, but I was prevented from doing pretty much anything useful. Their way of dealing with the huge number of errors being spit out of their PHP code was to turn off error messages. I'm so not sorry to be out of that place.
Considering their resistance to IT best practices, I doubt they would have listened if I suggested innovation.
-- Will program for bandwidth
but Participatory Management, the likes of which are taught at the University of Phoenix.
You need to change how management works and how management interacts with the employees.
This is not so simple, and employs new ideas like stewardship, empowerment, servant leadership, dynamic work teams, synergy, management participation, rewards for meeting deadlines and good suggestions that save money. When a suggestion saves money you usually give the employee who suggested it 10% of the amount of saved money. That is a very good motivator if it saves tens of thousands or hundred thousands, and makes the employees share the wealth. It also weeds out all of the "crap" ideas because employees want that 10% reward so they will try their best.
Also evaluate each team and do a 360 degree review with other employees reviewing their coworkers.
Servant Leadership, participatory management, and Building Dynamic Work Teams are a must! This is reinventing the corporation and reinventing management and empowering the employees to make their own decisions that concern their job so the managers are free to make management decisions to support the employees.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Don't punish them for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
1) Let people have machines/tools that they can control. If they need a machine to load a different OS or piece of SW, let them have it. Treat IT HW/SW Standards as a starting point, and as a fall-back, not as a limitation.
2) Standardize communication tools on open and text-based formats wherever possible. Eschewing Binary enables people to have the largest possible tool base for manipulation and automation.
3) Encourage people to automate any repetitive task -- even 1-off solutions usually contain /some/ repetitive task -- and expect them to present the script they used to produce their work.
4) Pay and promote people for their innovations in accord with their value to the company (or the people will go to other companies that will compensate).
1) No chairs, they just encourage people to rest. To facilitate their removal, during lunch or very early in the morning saw a notch in a leg of each chair at random. Pretty soon there will be no chairs left, and productivity will soar.
2) Require security staff to wear halloween masks, year round. It'll increase security presence, and show the guards have a sense of humor. Train guards to laugh, whenever they're stared at.
3) Restrict access to the elevators, storing boxes and such inside it to limit occupancy to one person. People need exercise to work productively. People that work on the lower floors should sign an "attendance" sheet kept on the top floor, every morning.
4) Cover all the walls with mirrors. You'll save tons of money on the lighting bill.
1) Have two or three employees per cubicle. It saves space, and increases teamwork.
2) Replace all incandescent bulbs with green tinted bulbs, use green tinted panels for overhead lights. It'll improve the employee's attention to detail.
5) Instead of free coffee in the break room, have free green tea (optionally switch containers and add food coloring). More caffiene means more work gets done. Because of the green lighting, most things will look green anyhow, and you can tell them it's still coffee.
6) Generally, rodents are considered pests, but if you lovingly refer to them by some random employees name, they become "pets". No more big spending on exterminators. Repeat after me, "How could you suggest killing [name], she's the lead receptionist!".
9) Make up a name, tell the employees he's the new junior vice president. Whenever something bad happens, blame it on this made up person. If the employees ask to see him, tell them he works at a different branch, or he's out of town on business. Optionally create an email address and phone extension for them. Watch all the negative energy flow away from you, and towards nobody.
6) Always have a "yes" man standing within five feet of you, to agree with everything you say. Most people will try to complain one on one, and this makes that virtually impossible.
8) Have an disreputable electrician switch line and neutral. They'll know what that means. Give them a couple hundred bucks to keep it quiet. Whenever somebody gets zapped, make jokes about them and their static electricity problem. Electricity is a mystical force, constant zaps will increase their sensitivity and alertness to unimaginable levels!
7) Email sharing. Save money by making anywhere from 3 to 7 employees share the same email address. Randomly switch addresses between these groups.
2) Replace the paper towel in bathrooms with a high grit sandpaper. It might cost slightly more, but your workers will be squeaky clean.
4) Randomly play folk music through the loudspeakers. Follow each song with a "Heeyah, folks! [imaginary persons name from idea 9] thought you might need some cheering up, so he told me to play a song for you.". Optionally pay someone beforehand to call on the phone, sing along to it, and have them say hello to the employees (this might be tricky, but it's worth it).
5) When talking to owners or customers, refer to your subordinates by a "group" name. Such as the "skunk works", "fruit loops", or "pig skins". This will increase your departments recognition, motivate employees, and get you a promotion.
16) Mismatch words, to describe common things. Instead of "search", use the word "sort". Instead of "email", use the word "access". Instead of "database", use "box". Or any creative blog you decide to invoke. See how that works? They'll have to think about it, and they'll often ask for clarification. What you do is repeat the entire phrase, without that word. Then smile and describe it slowly, like you're describing it to a child. Misunderstandings will be a thing of the past.
17) Use mixed messages. Whenever you have an employee of the month, or some other random person singled out, hang the picture of them (or just their name) above a garbage can, toilet or generally crooked/upside-down. This lets
Or wait in the unemployment line.
edfardos
Raffle for a prize, what a fucking joke.
What happened to the days where people actually moved up in a company for comming up with good ideas, aren't these people the ones who should be running the company ?
I'd sell drugs and steal before I ever worked for one of these companies run by people who have no skills other than manipulating and cheating people.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
...that companies will or at least should reward.
If I were managing an innovation program, I wouldn't accept anonymous suggestions. I want to know whose idea it is so I can offer them a shot at managing its' implementation. I want someone who can see the idea through to the end.
This stipulation doesn't preclude humble improvements to existing tools or processes. In fact, the best innovators probably already use their suggestions.
I feel certain suitable reward can be given to those who would take up my offer.
Ah, the smell of a freshly-printed management how-to book...I'm feeling the rush...
OTOH, if the suggestion is REALLY good and the suggestor is a consummate jackass or lacks visible teeth, manage the project yourself, let your nephew / mistress / factotum run interference, and *maybe* a small cash payment to the suggestor would work better.
But I think great ideas only come from people willing to champion them, who can stand subjecting them to criticism, and who can change them for a better idea is it comes along.
In other words, let's blacken the sky with project managers!!!
If what you are interested in doing is finding a mechanism by which to gather, sort, and rank innovations or ideas, there are a number of software vendors that can be useful. One of my personal favorites is CrowdSound, which offers an embeddable widget for doing just that. There are many, many players in this space, and you can find a short list at: http://blogs.forrester.com/vendor_strategy/2008/12/innovation-vend.html I work at a company called Xpree, which specializes in tapping the wisdom of the corporate crowd a little later in the game. We provide collective forecasting (prediction markets) from scenario planning onwards to demand planning, supply chain pricing, product quality, and other metrics. We use a well-incented and anonymous gamelike structure, and allow your company's employees to provide agile truth-without-consequences forecasts.
In the military, if you come up with a money-saving idea, you get a percentage of the money saved. At least, so it was once upon a time. AFAIK it still is.
If you really want to hear people's ideas for improvement, you need to really reward them for it. To do so means through pay incentives/raises/bonuses, of course, and also by actually *implementing* those ideas. People soon lose interest in a suggestion box that could be easily mistaken for a wastebasket. And for ideas not implemented, people should get weasle-free feedback as to why the idea wasn't chosen.
Excluding the stone-cold-homo-economicus types
You mean like sales guys? I'm a dev, but if I do something that impacts the company out of proportion to my salary (those million dollar ideas), give me 10%. It's easier than me starting a company to build some new thing into a money maker.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Without knowing the size of your company, I'm going to assume you're not a Microsoft or Adobe-size company.
A corporation shows appreciation by rewarding it in a real way. Having a prize for the most innovation does the opposite. You're being fake, and you'll be disliked for it. Drop the game show approach IMMEDIATELY. I'd even go so far as to call it a bad idea apologize for it. If the prize is significant enough that people will care, come up with a better way to award it.
Making a company survive in a time of economic crisis is a time for cooperation. If people like working for you, they'll come up with ways to help. Be open to new ideas: your description of how the idea is processed makes me think you're not really open, and your culture probably reflects that. And make it perfectly clear that once survival is assured, some of the money will go into employee pockets. This isn't just to motivate them, and it isn't something to skip or wriggle out of later. You do this because it's the right thing to do to people who are helping you.
Let's be perfectly clear here: You are NOT rewarding revolutionary good ideas. You are rewarding optimization, whether it comes through revolutionary good ideas (unlikely) or several generations of evolutionary tuning of what you're already doing. You are NOT on the lookout for the brilliant idea that will double your efficiency. You are looking for the dozens of ideas that will each shave add few percentage points.
Be patient, because you are where you are because of what you've done in the past. Corporate cultures are not changed overnight. You need to become less dysfunctional one day at a time.
Nothing motivates people like a pile of cash or as-good-as-cash vouchers. After all, why do we turn up for work every day?
Of course it was too good to last and after an unrelated management clusterfuck that cost them dear they shut it down and offered far less attractive terms that I know for a fact has lead to several great ideas being kept under wraps by employees who'd rather go solo (or to a rival company) with their idea than give it over for nothing more than a pat on the back.
There is no music - home taping killed it.
I knew you'd all start talking about % royalties and all that sort of 'carrot' nonsense. Go back to tried and true methods - tell everyone they have to come up with an idea, rank the ideas, and fire the weakest 5%. You can bet your next round of ideas will be red hot.
'Percentage of the royalties', Ha!
There's more than one type of employee.
Grossly simplifying the situation:
Employees who love their company and the desperate
Neutral employees and the semi-jaded
Employees who hate their company, but don't currently have a better alternative and the jaded
The happy to work here can generally be motivated by it being something they wanted to do, or the feeling of helping out.
The desperate will ALWAYS hand over ideas in a desperate bid to appear valuable so they'll be among the last to be laid off.
The neutral employee sees the job as a simple exchange, X hours of labor for Y pay. If you want them to contribute, you'll have to make it worth their while. Everyone has a price, and these prices vary wildly.
The employee who despises you (or has been bitten one too many times by bad management in the past) sees the company as a necessary evil that he has to deal with, but that can't be trusted. This class of employee expects that if he gives a suggestion "oh, someone already thought of that" and the boss or someone else takes the credit and more importantly to this employee, financial reward.
Many employees fall into one of these broad categories, some can drift around according to their mood at the moment. It's almost impossible to make a crowd of jaded employees love you. It's VERY easy to turn those that love you jaded.
Suggestions:
If you have payroll problems (I've seen this at several companies where employees had to be on constant guard against being underpayed) forget happy employees.
If retribution exists where you work, and if anyone around knows of someone fired, demoted or harmed by it, forget happy employees.
If you bait and switch, offering employees choices or incentives that never appear, forget happy employees.
The idea system MUST BE WELL DOCUMENTED. People will be jaded QUICKLY by an idea someone else thought of first if you can't PROVE the other person legitimately beat them to it.
Many places have a contract for employment that states whatever an employee comes up with, the company owns, and spell out NO benefits to the employee for coming up with an idea.
As one other entry said, breakfast with a manager is NOT a worthy prize. Even if you like your manager, you see them enough. They're not a rock star. Managers are the face of the unpopular decisions that come from above. It's the manager's responsibility to ride herd on the slackers. Doing nothing but their job, a manager will be unpopular, even though they have no say in the policies from above they have to force on the employees. (Dress code oddities, random lashings out against anything resembling a sense of humor)
Does your company hate humor? If anyone has ever gotten in trouble for say, a project with a silly acronym or a web page with a fortune file, you'll have a hard time keeping happy employees. If you ask employees to take down comics, or take them down yourself, you have a problem.
How smooth is your work environment? Does everyone work together seamlessly, or are you organized into divisions that do anything possible to avoid work from other divisions? Frustration loses happy employees.
Is pay competitive?
JOB SECURITY. NOW MORE THAN EVER. (And only increasing over the next few years) Many will NOT suggest ideas that even if accepted, they won't be around to reap the benefit of or fear someone will take credit for and get rid of them to cover their tracks. You have VERY FEW happy employees during layoffs. The standard line of having managers tell everyone THEIR job is safe until the minute they fire them is one of the few things that crushes morale faster than layoffs themselves. A layoff will force most employees to at least neutral. A *single* employee getting "you're safe, you're safe, you're FIRED!" will send everyone into "the company is my enemy" mode. This direct lying on a matter of such grave importance should be grounds for termination of the manager doing it. Yes, I know managers are to
I'd say also stop treating the CEOs and upper management like gods. A company's success is the sum of its parts, and the way things are currently structured, I can't see a single thing that would motivate an employee to suggest ideas that would put a new yacht or summer home in the hands of someone else. Spreading the wealth would provide some real incentive.
Second, if the company's culture has its roots in political infighting and empire building, this kind of environment can't exist. It simply isn't worth the effort when the potential for good ideas to get crushed under the egos of incompetent management.
And that's the real issue, that as a company grows it's ability to innovate is stifled because the cooperative spirit fostered by meaningful work and appropriate compensation is replaced by bureaucratic overhead and a sense of corporate entitlement.
If a corporation wants employees to innovate it needs to be innovative in it's approach. Offer 1%, siphon workers into funded shell companies and "buy" them back once they're successful, or just develop a reputation for awarding huge bonuses (i'm talking multiples of annual salary) to employees whose willingness to invest their ideas and effort into the company pay off in spades.
All these are just methods of making reward commensurate with effort, and making an employee's work meaningful. Miss that, and the company misses out.
Stop trying to find ways to screw over employees. Pay them 1/2 of everything it saves the company for 1 year. A raffle? People aren't stupid. They'll see that's just flim flam. If you use the idea *thank them by paying them money dammit*! They don't need pats-on-the-back. They don't need an award. They need to pay the damned bills. Life is hard. People need to be rewarded for making the company money. It's that simple.
It's comon practice for management types, nearing their year-in performance review, usually at the half-year, to encourage the succullent underlings to voice ideas of innovation, ideas of improvement, ideas of better working condition, etc..
All too often, the Management, uses the ideas as if they were his/her own, in messages/reports to higher-ups, in order to secure successful passage, of him/her, to the next Management level, which is exactly the point.
The Management is not your friend.
The Management is your very dearest, most dispicable, enemy.
The past three places I have worked I have run into walls trying to suggest and implement new ways to make the workplace more productive. Every time you want to document something, a SME throws a hissy fit because of 'job security'. Every time you want to streamline a procedure, some M&P team throws a hissy fit because of 'job security'. All it does is make people angry because more productivity means less jobs for them.
In our company management offered a $100 prize money for best idea to reduce the costs of the company. The winner was the guy who suggested to reduce the prize money to $25.
A company's success is the sum of its parts, and the way things are currently structured, I can't see a single thing that would motivate an employee to suggest ideas that would put a new yacht or summer home in the hands of someone else.
Thank you for saying so succinctly what I've been arguing for years.
I believe the company stock plan (making all employees "owners", so they'll work really, really hard) is one of the biggest scams ever foisted off on the American worker.
Let's say I come up with an idea that causes the company stock price to increase by one dollar. For my 400 shares, bought at some discount, I gain 400 dollars. But the CEO and the other high rollers, who were each given 50,000 shares as recruitment bonuses, not to mention later free grants of stock, make $50,000 off my idea. Some amplification factor, no?
Have a look in Yahoo finance or elsewhere that insider trading is documented. I wondered how some of these guys, in any given month, could cash in or dispense as gifts, some thousands of shares. I also wondered what it said about their faith in the company. That question is generally dismissed as simply "prudent diversification in their stock portfolios". But I still think it's just as much a lack of faith in the company's future prospects.
It's bad enough that CEOs made some 40 or 50 times the pay of the lowest paid employee, but it's now up in the range of 400 times in many cases. I worked for a company where the incoming CEO was guaranteed $4M per year even if he had to be taken out and shot for non-performance. If he escaped that fate, he was eligible for up to another $8M per year, in addition to initial and ongoing stock grants. This was in a company with only a few thousand employees.
Sorry, I see no reason why I should bust my ass to aggrandize this son of a bitch.
While I have your kind attention, I should mention that another major scam on the worker is the "attrition" concept as applied to downsizing, especially in a union environment. The corporations started this scam years ago to mute the protests of the workers. "We won't lay anyone off -- we'll just abolish jobs as people leave the company." Bullshit -- apparently the unions didn't realize they lost power with each job lost to attrition. I also worked for a large railroad that had some 60K employees when I started in the 60s. By the time the outfit was sold in the 90s, they were down to something under 10K employees. Since much of management and many exempt employees came from the operating and IT divisions, they had plenty of talent to run the trains and computers pretty well in case of a strike.
Another sweet one they pulled was against the security force. Originally, railroad cops were sworn law enforcement and carried sidearms. Their uniforms were kind of olive drab, but they still looked otherwise like city cops.
Somewhere along the way, they offered the cops the chance to give up the union and get a raise by becoming exempt employees. The offer was accepted. The uniforms went away and were replaced with business suits.
Within six months, they were all fired when their now not-union-protected jobs were outsourced to Burns Security minimum wage wannabe cops, armed only with walkie talkies.
Most places actually seem be rather innovation-hostile. When a manager talks about "innovation", usually that means something like R&D or engineering. Workers that aren't officially in these departments, by definition, do not innovate. An incident I'll always remember was in a summer job, where I also did some assembly-line canning of liquids. There was an elderly woman feeding cans to the system. Now, the stack was misaligned, so I had to manually turn each can before filling it - that is, completely useless work for nothing, easily eliminated. I suggested that she'd turn the stack the correct way around, so I got this extremely hostile reply that this is the way it's been done for the last 30 years, and she's not gonna change it. Because I was a summer trainee, I was junior to her, and by definition, she was right. What makes this even more mind-boggling was that I read a report where an industrial engineer had researched the same woman doing a very similar job, and found an analogous way to improve it and save her of the sickness leave caused by the wrist strain. In conclusion, humans are monkeys that work primarily by hierarchy, not intelligence.
If this thread is any measure, asking people for an idea on how to solve a problem seems to work. Hundreds of suggestions later, and it is possible to see who had "innovative" ideas and which ideas are commonly asserted (but possibly still good).
i) pay them a pittance
ii) take their ideas
iii) sack them
iv) profit!
Should work, shouldn't it. Can't really see any problems with the standard MBA approach.
Any idea generating process and motivations need to match your corporate culture, there is no single sized answer for everyone. At my company, we have a very tiny budget to do any type of directly innovative work. Usually, any innovation we do is around optimization of existing work or picking the right or most important things from the todo list. Therefore, one of our biggest challenges is getting everybody, especially developers, to actually understand the company's and our customer's problems. They may have a nifty idea around a product using our core technology, but the direction to monetize the idea is usually too big of a jump for our company or the idea maker really doesn't understand the space to realize how business works around that idea. As for the motivation, I've found recognition to be a the biggest return. We do comp, but its never enough to justify the time to pitch, adjust and repitch ideas. Recognition, on the other hand, can not only make you feel better but it has long term value for promotions and picking choice assignments. This isn't my answer as a manager, but is more personal experience. I have been deeply involved in the few innovative my company has had the ability to consider. The extra money wouldn't have justified the time and pain. But, its given me enough attention so that other things in my job have become easier.
How to encourage workers has not been a secret since 1968, when Frederick Herzberg published a brilliant book on his research on motivating engineers.
http://www.amazon.com/Motivation-Work-Frederick-Herzberg/dp/156000634X
0x or or snor perron?!
1. encourage people to contribute.
2. provide feedback that their contribution was received and was rationally considered. If my
idea won't work I'd like to know why.
3. provide feedback to everyone about ideas that were contributed. If they were not implemented
why? If they were show the reward the contributor got. You won't get the same seemingly good
idea over and over and your workers will become more knowledgable about the business.
This assumes your management is rational. Which is almost never a correct assumption.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
If you are very lucky and actually have one of these rare geniuses as employees, they will not need special motivation to lay their ideas at your feet, they will due it out of joy / because they think it's appropriate and needs to be done, unless they really hate their job.
Also, do not underestimate the effect of an honest reaction to a worthless idea. Even if they agree with you, people take offense at being confronted with the reality of half-assed ideas or their own finite capability in general. So don't even start asking for ideas (from those people who don't bring them by themselves) if you can't keep a straight face while telling them how great their worthless idea is.
It's a very common delusion that if you just feed and treat your employees well, they will love you enough to give you more than you're paying them for, ingenious ideas that will fatten your wallet while they will get a tiny bonus. They won't - we live in a capitalist world and both creative and selfless employees are scarce, while jealousy is omnipresent. It's not nice, but it's their right, just like it is yours (as an employer) to reconsider at any moment whether you're getting from them what you're paying for.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
You give suggestions,
1: IT BECOMES THEIRS
2: They make money of it
3:???
4: YOU LOSE!
1. Ask them.
2. Take their suggestions seriously.
3. Follow up.
4. Implement if they are feasible.
5. Allow experimentation (3Com model)
It also helps if you foster an environment of learning and encouragement of risk-taking (within limits). Buck-passing and finger-pointing have brought consultancies many dollars.
Do what Google does: give employees 20% of their paid time to work on whatever they want, no strings attached. That way you're putting your money where your mouth is and not just paying lip-service to suggestions like most companies do. I don't know how many times I've made good suggestions to a given boss (often backing it up with a white paper citing cost/benefit analysis) only to be told that my suggestion would eliminate someone's job security, or lead to internecine warfare, or piss on someone's shoes, or any other politically-influenced horseshit.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Wow, the OP asks for examples of applications that encourage innovation. There are over two hundred responses and none appear to actually answer the question.
Take a look at the Why Not? idea exchange. This one is most probably the best fit for stimulating ideas but is the least appropriate for corporate use.
The first of the challenge based innovation sites was most probably Innocentive. Please excuse the shameless self promotion but do take a look at Cogenuity (currently in beta) which does a better job than Innocentive at combining challenge based collective intelligence with social networking.
I have blogged about Cogenuity and about these and other problem solving applications elsewhere.
Good luck with your search!
How 'bout giving them a) a raise, b) a percentage of the profits based on what it does for the bottom line, or c) a promotion and a raise?
Or is it too much to be given what they *DESERVE*?
In the early nineties, I worked for a company in Austin, TX. I got put on thie project, where they handed me a literal shoebox of floppies, and was told I'd be loading them. I asked what I was going to do next week, and was told not to worry. THREE MONTHS LATER, I understood: they had me use a database loader that came with the d/b (Empress, back then, a second-tier relational d/b). If something failed, it kicked everything out, and I had to figure out what was wrong, and where.
Next time I got one, I had a different manager (so-called matrix management), and I asked her if she'd let me *write* a validating d/b loader program, I figured it would take no longer, if not less time, than the last bunch. She figured she had the budget, and let me. A few months later, I was loading the *entire* shoebox of floppies, *and* scanning each for viruses, in a couple hours.
My "reward"? Lessee, I think that was the year "we're not doing well", and I got a $400/yr raise. AND THEN, within a year, they took maintenance and enhancement of it away from me (I didn't have a 4-yr degree at the time,and they gave it to someone who'd *just* gotten one... never mind I have been programming for a living since before some of them were in high school).
So nice little plaques are cute... and tell you that you're worth exactly the cost of the plaque, wholesale.
I'm happy to say, btw, that the company went down, and was bought out and taken over by a national company.
mark
Let the workers become the investors who expect to raise the value of their shares through thinking up bright ideas for the company.
Encourage this as an attractive type of inside investment for their retirement plans.
Duh.
A percentage share of the profits or the cost-savings, and public acknowledgment that they did something good for the company.
The same thing the execs want for starting/running the company.
Not really all that hard to figure out (or to do), but most companies lose sight of it beyond about 300 staff members, and start using "incentives" that create negative real results, but make the hoardes of middle managers feel better that they have something to measure with "metrics".
+++OK ATH
The more the merrier.
Anything else is a cop-out.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That's fine with me. But you might want to take it up with David Spade. He's the one that said it in "Tommy Boy".
Go go Gadget Nailgun!
Anonymous.
Management should solicit ideas through anonymous communication channels.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
That's my patented idea there! You owe me!
Give Stock Options to all your Workers.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Hi all, A friend forwarded this thread to me and I thought it might be appropriate to chime in. I work for Arc90, a consulting and product company in NYC and we recently released Kindling, an idea management and collaboration web app. I loved many of your comments because they sound so familiar to the feelings and frustrations we had with finding the right way to tap into our employees' ideas. Check out Kindling (www.kindlingapp.com) if you're interested- we built it for exactly these use cases! Thanks, Jen :)