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| Employees
Drive Idea Program by Jim Collison |
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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 |
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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. |
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