Managers need to discuss the following topics with their employees:
✔ Employee impact: Are employees aware of how they impact the company’s bottom line, that is, how their jobs financially impact the organization?
Revenue-generating ideas: How can the company generate additional income? Whether it’s new fees, cross-selling, or up-selling, what new ideas could be tried?
✔ Cost-savings suggestions: How can costs be trimmed, delayed, or eliminated? Which expenses are critical and which are optional and could at least be cut temporarily?
✔ Process improvements: What steps in the organization’s processes can be streamlined, saving time, resources, and money along the way?
✔ Customer needs and requests: How can employees help others in the company who are focused on customer needs and requests? How can customers’ needs be further explored?
✔ New products or services: What ideas exist for new products or services? How could those ideas be better developed and implemented?
✔ Morale and teambuilding: Who is interested in helping to improve employee teamwork and morale? How can this be done at little cost?
✔ Virtual employees: How can virtual employees be better utilized by and integrated into the organization?
Asking employees for their input and ideas
I have yet to see an organization that doesn’t have an open door policy, in which employees are encouraged to speak to their managers about any concerns, ideas, or suggestions they have. In practice, however, this policy doesn’t always work very well if, at the point of interaction, one’s manager is not receptive to the input.
Soliciting ideas needs to be a constant, ongoing strategy. Conducting employee surveys and asking staff questions in a meeting is a start, but to maximize buy-in and motivation, you need to challenge your employees to identify ways to improve on an ongoing basis. Employee engagement should be both a philosophy and a practice. Employees need to understand that you need their efforts now more than ever before, and then you need to create new mechanisms that inspire their ongoing involvement to improve.
Boardroom, Inc., a newsletter and book publisher based in Greenwich, Connecticut, expects every employee – from receptionist to chairman – to submit at least two ideas each week for improvements. Initially established to encourage cost-savings, the Boardroom, Inc., program is called “I Power,” and the company credits the suggestion program with a five-fold increase in its revenues as well as untold benefit to the morale, energy, and retention of its employees. Each employee is asked to turn in two suggestions each week; these suggestions are evaluated the same week by an employee volunteer. For many of the suggestions, the evaluator says, “What a great idea!” and returns the idea to the person who suggested it with the implicit permission to proceed to implement the idea.
As Martin Edelston, chairman and CEO of Boardroom says, “Sometimes the best idea can come from the newest, least experienced person on your staff.” Like the hourly paid shipping clerk who suggested that the company consider trimming the paper size of one of its books to get under the 4-pound rate and save some postage. The company made the change and did, indeed, save postage: a half a million dollars the first year and several years since. Explains Marty, “I had been working in mail-order for over 20 years and never realized there was a 4-pound shipping rate. But the person who was doing the job knew it, as do most employees know how their jobs can be improved.”
The first year of the program, suggestions were limited to one’s own job until employees got the idea that the intention was less to complain about things than to try to think how things could be improved. The company now even has group meetings just to brainstorm and share ideas about specific issues or functions in the company.
And the benefits of the suggestions are not limited to saving money. Says Antoinette Baugh, director of personnel, “People love working here because they know they can be a part of a system where they can make a contribution.” Adds Lisa Castonguay, renewals and billing manager, “My first couple of weeks, I was kind of taken aback because everyone was smiling and everyone was open.” She recalls her first day of work when she was pulled into a group meeting and, within 30 minutes of walking in the front door, was asked, “What do you think we should do about this problem?”
Lisa almost fell on the floor. Why? Because she had just come from a company where she had worked for eight years, and no one had ever asked her for her opinion about anything. After she got over the initial shock, she realized that having her opinions and ideas sought after and valued by those she worked with felt pretty good. As a result, she wanted to think of even more ways to help the company.
The impact is both positive and contagious. “People became agents of their own change,” says Marty. “There’s so much inside all of us, and we don’t even know it’s there until someone asks about it. And in the process, it just builds and builds.” Adds Brian Kurtz, vice president of marketing, “It’s a constant flow of communication. People are not sitting in a cubicle, totally insulated from one another.”
Involving employees in decision-making
When employees believe they have a hand in decision-making, companywide buy-in and participation is much easier to obtain. If the general consensus among staff is that decisions will be made with or without their input, the likelihood of anyone providing open and honest feedback is quite small. Asking employees for their input shows that you respect and trust them, and it likely increases the quality of the decisions being made.
No one knows how to better do a job than the person who is currently doing that job, so starting there makes sense. For example, if a reporting process is ineffective or costly, talk to the individual responsible for managing the process. Take the example of a receptionist at Champion Solutions Group in Florida, who received expense reports from field sales representatives via overnight delivery. When the company implemented her suggestion that the reports be faxed instead of shipped, it saw a 40 percent reduction in postage costs – and led company leaders to seek the advice of employees for other ways to realize cost savings.
