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.
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
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.
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.
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'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.