Your Employees Hold the Key to Innovation
Why your innovation strategy needs employee ideas and how you can get them
Innovation remains a key focus and stated priority for many organizations, and for good reason. The world is enamoured with the Uber, Airbnb and other disruptive company success stories. For leadership it creates both a desire to create their own equally disruptive offerings and a fear of becoming obsolete. But with disruption leading the conversations around innovation, have we lost sight of the value of continuous improvement? Research indicates that much of the time, it’s these small, incremental changes that yield much better results.
Employees can and should be an important part of an organization’s innovation strategy. If everyone at an organization consciously looks for ways to improve, great things happen. The role of the organization is to develop and provide the right processes, habits, and culture that fosters creativity and innovation.
Can the average employee come up with a great ideas?
Let’s start with the pink elephant in the “employees have great ideas” room. Does the average employee actually have great, useful ideas? The answer is not as simple as yes or no. It’s true that it’s rare to generate breakthrough, disruptive ideas using an employee idea program, however, research continually shows that there’s still significant potential in employee ideas.
Consider the power not of big, breakthrough disruptive ideas, but of a bias towards action. Of implementing small, incremental improvements consistently as problems are identified. Organizations that have compared returns from ‘big idea projects’ to returns from ‘continuous, incremental innovation’, have consistently found that a bias toward action for implementing known solutions to known problems has a bigger impact than identifying the biggest opportunities for improvement and launching projects to realize those opportunities. This is true across many use cases like improving patient care, realizing savings, improving productivity and increasing employee engagement. In fact, according to The Idea-Driven Organization, up to 80% of an organization’s performance improvement potential lies in employee ideas.
Why is this? The reason is that small teams or leadership will never know what the employee base knows collectively. The “iceberg of ignorance” was a term coined by Sidney Yoshida to reflect the findings of a study completed in 1989 that’s still relevant today. In the study, he found that leadership could only list 4% of the problems known to front-line employees. While the biggest opportunities and issues are very likely known to leadership, it’s really only the tip of the iceberg for potential innovations. Individually, they do not add up to much, but as a whole, there’s tremendous value in all these ideas. By continually improving, it’s also possible to leapfrog much of what gets labelled as disruptive innovation.
So while we don’t advocate giving up on other innovation efforts, we do strongly believe that an organization needs a strong, healthy employee idea program as part of their innovation strategy.
OK, so employee ideas are good – how hard is it to do well?
Not all employee idea programs are equal and many are in fact unsuccessful. Through our research, we found that there’s a clear and significant difference between an average and well-run program:
• The average suggestion system has just under 10% adoption vs. more than 50% for well- run programs
• The average suggestion system gets fewer than .5 ideas per employee per year vs. multiple ideas per employee per year for well-run programs
• The average program often increases employee disengagement vs. having a significant positive impact on motivation and productivity
• Top performing idea programs have contributed hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars to the bottom line in the form of efficiency, productivity, savings, decreasing turnover and maximizing revenue streams
• Well-run idea programs have more than 20x the participation and 8x the number of ideas implemented
Read more | soapboxhq.com
Innovation remains a key focus and stated priority for many organizations, and for good reason. The world is enamoured with the Uber, Airbnb and other disruptive company success stories. For leadership it creates both a desire to create their own equally disruptive offerings and a fear of becoming obsolete. But with disruption leading the conversations around innovation, have we lost sight of the value of continuous improvement? Research indicates that much of the time, it’s these small, incremental changes that yield much better results.
Employees can and should be an important part of an organization’s innovation strategy. If everyone at an organization consciously looks for ways to improve, great things happen. The role of the organization is to develop and provide the right processes, habits, and culture that fosters creativity and innovation.
Can the average employee come up with a great ideas?
Let’s start with the pink elephant in the “employees have great ideas” room. Does the average employee actually have great, useful ideas? The answer is not as simple as yes or no. It’s true that it’s rare to generate breakthrough, disruptive ideas using an employee idea program, however, research continually shows that there’s still significant potential in employee ideas.
Consider the power not of big, breakthrough disruptive ideas, but of a bias towards action. Of implementing small, incremental improvements consistently as problems are identified. Organizations that have compared returns from ‘big idea projects’ to returns from ‘continuous, incremental innovation’, have consistently found that a bias toward action for implementing known solutions to known problems has a bigger impact than identifying the biggest opportunities for improvement and launching projects to realize those opportunities. This is true across many use cases like improving patient care, realizing savings, improving productivity and increasing employee engagement. In fact, according to The Idea-Driven Organization, up to 80% of an organization’s performance improvement potential lies in employee ideas.
Why is this? The reason is that small teams or leadership will never know what the employee base knows collectively. The “iceberg of ignorance” was a term coined by Sidney Yoshida to reflect the findings of a study completed in 1989 that’s still relevant today. In the study, he found that leadership could only list 4% of the problems known to front-line employees. While the biggest opportunities and issues are very likely known to leadership, it’s really only the tip of the iceberg for potential innovations. Individually, they do not add up to much, but as a whole, there’s tremendous value in all these ideas. By continually improving, it’s also possible to leapfrog much of what gets labelled as disruptive innovation.
So while we don’t advocate giving up on other innovation efforts, we do strongly believe that an organization needs a strong, healthy employee idea program as part of their innovation strategy.
OK, so employee ideas are good – how hard is it to do well?
Not all employee idea programs are equal and many are in fact unsuccessful. Through our research, we found that there’s a clear and significant difference between an average and well-run program:
• The average suggestion system has just under 10% adoption vs. more than 50% for well- run programs
• The average suggestion system gets fewer than .5 ideas per employee per year vs. multiple ideas per employee per year for well-run programs
• The average program often increases employee disengagement vs. having a significant positive impact on motivation and productivity
• Top performing idea programs have contributed hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars to the bottom line in the form of efficiency, productivity, savings, decreasing turnover and maximizing revenue streams
• Well-run idea programs have more than 20x the participation and 8x the number of ideas implemented
Read more | soapboxhq.com