Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I think first companies need to make employees feel comfortable criticizing their superiors.
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.
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...
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.
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.
That was easy.
It's even easier than that. All you really have to do is convince your employees that their suggestion might actually get used, and most of them would be perfectly happy to make suggestions just for the bragging rights of being able to say "that was my idea". any kind of public recognition is a bonus, monetary compensation would be top notch, but is by no means necessary.
The company I work for, by contrast, makes it quite plain that our ideas are not only unwanted but that we should stop trying to waste their time with our ramblings. So be it.
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Ownership was the first word that came to my mind when I read this question. I would be a lot more likely to share my ideas if I got credit for them, and some sort of reward (monetary) for the success of the idea. I don't need a free toaster, or the 'possibility' of receiving a prize between me and 100 other people who had ideas. The best idea will win out, and when it does the person who had it should be compensated. Especially in a software development field, given enough hours I can make my own idea a reality that translates into money in my pocket, but I'd share it with the company if it translated a lot quicker.
I hate the idea of giving away the rights to an idea because you pitch the idea to your employer.
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.
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.
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
Oh lets fire the janitor because his suggestion on how to improve productivity has failed.
Corrected version:
Oh lets fire the janitor because his suggestion I have plagiarized on how to improve productivity has succeeded.
And I personally think that giving away bonuses would only increase tension and discrimination inside of teams.
I prefer simpler idea suggested above: permit to criticize management and their decisions. Ban on criticism is essentially what most often leads to disappearance of discussions. Healthy discussion is what drives innovation.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
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.
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.
Make it a percentage of the cost savings as a lump bonus and you'll not only get more suggestions, you'll get onces that actually have some thought and implementation plans put into them.
I agree. If you give ideas of yours to your company and your work is not actually producing ideas, you should get a "royalty". The company should make sure that a proper mechanism exists to assign the idea a monetary value. Get accounting to produce numbers for it and give the person that came up with the idea a percentage of the money gained/saved during that time.
Ideally, a worker could retire if his idea is so good as to make loads of money for the company. At the end of the day that is an executive/consultant job. And this kind of people get showered in millions even when they fail miserably like in the current crisis.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
No, no. The'd rather spend the week making work schedules and powerpoint presentations and manpower allocation charts for the productivity idea, rather than actually doing the change. The time lost in the paperwork and bureaucracy are often so great that it's simply not worth the effort for minor, technologically or procedurally sensitive ideas because it has to go through 4 layers of management, all of them playing "telephone" and turning your idea for a safety switch into a complete sytem redesign, made by a new and unknown vendor who made a great presentation to people who know nothing about the field but spell their last name the same way as the company founder.
I saw this happen about 5 years ago: it was _amazing_ to watch the middle management burn the company to the ground with endless procedures and study groups, rather than knuckling down and doing the actually necessary work, and the results were evident in the handling of email and printers that I discussed with them as another business in the same building.
You are in a way right. Yet you are wrong.
Talk is air. Work is what drives innovation.
There are countless - failed - products around. Failed solely because people who did them didn't bothered to communicate with customers, releasing essentially gimmick nobody needs.
Healthy discussions with customers about shortcomings of a product, followed by inside discussions on why product ended up released in that way. That's how companies survive in long term: by making something others want to buy.
This entire discussion is a sign of poor hiring by the company involved. If they want innovative people they should hire innovative people. It isn't that hard - look for people who have done innovative things in the past and pay them money to work for you.
That's just plain stupid.
Sorry for the oxymoron, but all people are born innovative. True managerial talent is to get the innovative nature out of people for good of business.
General problem with hiring "innovative people" is that most of them can't keep on the same piece of work for very long time. Innovation is matter of a short moments. End product - is thousands person/days of many many employees. Few truly innovative people can stick to the business routine. And very few companies go to compromise and provide innovative people with sort of isolated environment - where they are isolated from usual business routine related to making of a product.
The rest is just common sense: give them the responsibility and resources to achieve change, think twice before screwing them over, and expand the scope of their resources (personal or departmental) as they deliver results.
That's common sense. Yet your base off by far.
Responsibilities is what used to keep people in check. Yet, not much people are capable of bearing responsibilities. If one can - then they'd likely to choose managerial career. That means rest of "innovative" bunch is precisely the people who can't manage, can't cope with responsibilities and rarely can work under pressure. In other words - rest of us, employees.
That's why proper communication with employees is needed. General problem that many managers can't cope with critique of their decisions. Eventually any kind of critique falls under unwritten ban leading to dried up communication within company.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.