Employees
Drive Idea Program
by Jim Collison
There is tremendous
untapped knowledge and ability within your employees. You know this.
So how do you help them put it to work for your organization?
You decide
the answer is some kind of an employee suggestion program. You’ve
heard of employee involvement programs that reward employees for
their ideas. But you’ve tried a suggestion box in the past
and that didn’t work very well. So what might you do?
One successful
alternative to traditional suggestion programs is called an Employee-Driven
Idea System (EDIS). It’s explained in the book “Employee-Driven
Quality: Releasing the Creative Spirit of Your Organization Through
Suggestion Systems.” It’s written by Robin McDermott,
Raymond Mikulak and Michael Beauregard.
Modern
Suggestion Program
An employee-driven
idea system is a modern-day employee suggestion program.
It takes the spirit of the traditional suggestion system and adapts
it to a Total Quality-type environment. Said McDermott: “It
differs from a traditional system in two basic ways: (1) The employees
drive their own ideas to completion, and (2) It works.”
Toyota, USA,
using the employee-driven idea system approach, increased suggestion
program participation from 12.5% to 93.2% within only three years.
Toyota employees have seen 98.9% of their 38,000 improvement ideas
implemented in a single year!
Some companies
hit 60% participation rates in the first year of implementing such
a suggestion program. Meanwhile, employee participation in traditional
suggestion programs averages about 10%.
What’s
Wrong with Traditional Suggestion Programs?
Asked what’s
wrong with the traditional-type suggestion programs, McDermott said
the traditional suggestion programs focus on financial rewards and
bottom-line savings to the company. Consequently, small ideas that
bring small savings and small employee rewards go unsubmitted or
unimplemented.
In contrast
to the old-type employee suggestion program, the employee-driven
idea system focuses on employee involvement. All ideas are equally
rewarded with token rewards – perhaps a couple dollars to
an individual for an idea, or a dollar to each member of a team
for a team idea. Small ideas are suggested and implemented, and
the small, continuous improvements build on one another. At Toyota,
for example, 85% of employee ideas are approved for implementation
within five days. |
