How do employees share ideas in your company? Is there a process in place for employees to voice their thoughts? How do right ideas reach the right people?
I can give you an anti-pattern: for years IBM had an ideas program (I think called "Think Up!" but not certain). Employees could submit their idea online and it would be evaluated by "someone".
I turned out to be one of those someones. Any employee idea that mentioned "internet" or "web" in the 1990s got forwarded to me to "resolve". The problem I quickly ran into was that there was no way for me to say "Hey, this is a good idea, I have no means/method/funding to implement it myself". I could only accept ideas (which I then had to document how to implement and implement) or reject them. After getting repeatedly reprimanded for not acting on employee ideas I started rejecting them en masse. All of them, regardless of the value. If it ended up on my desk, I rejected it.
And I eventually won an award for being such a valuable "contributor" to the IBM Ideas program.
So, if you implement some sort of ideas program, make sure that there's some sort of process in place to move the idea from "hey, that's a great idea" to implementing it. Depending on the size of your organization, it's likely that you will get some great ideas from people who have absolutely no idea how to implement the idea. Make sure there's a way to catch these and figure out how to implement them.
"make sure that there's some sort of process in place to move the idea from "hey, that's a great idea" to implementing it. "
I agree , however value lies in being able to identify other people who have similar ideas within the organization and be able to filter them out. A lot of people don't speak up in structured settings however having an anonymous forum where everyone in an organization irrespective of rank can post ideas and their bosses (also anonymous can unanimously up-vote or down-vote ) creates good synergies. The idea may not necessarily be implemented .
3 comments
[ 73.5 ms ] story [ 713 ms ] threadI turned out to be one of those someones. Any employee idea that mentioned "internet" or "web" in the 1990s got forwarded to me to "resolve". The problem I quickly ran into was that there was no way for me to say "Hey, this is a good idea, I have no means/method/funding to implement it myself". I could only accept ideas (which I then had to document how to implement and implement) or reject them. After getting repeatedly reprimanded for not acting on employee ideas I started rejecting them en masse. All of them, regardless of the value. If it ended up on my desk, I rejected it.
And I eventually won an award for being such a valuable "contributor" to the IBM Ideas program.
So, if you implement some sort of ideas program, make sure that there's some sort of process in place to move the idea from "hey, that's a great idea" to implementing it. Depending on the size of your organization, it's likely that you will get some great ideas from people who have absolutely no idea how to implement the idea. Make sure there's a way to catch these and figure out how to implement them.
I agree , however value lies in being able to identify other people who have similar ideas within the organization and be able to filter them out. A lot of people don't speak up in structured settings however having an anonymous forum where everyone in an organization irrespective of rank can post ideas and their bosses (also anonymous can unanimously up-vote or down-vote ) creates good synergies. The idea may not necessarily be implemented .