Suggestion
Program for Ideas
by Jim Collison
The quickest
and simplest way to work miracles in your workplace is to ask your
employees for their ideas.
And the smartest,
most effective way to get the most ideas from your employees is
with a formal employee involvement program (more commonly called
a suggestion program).
Right this minute
your employees have in their heads ideas that would cut costs, saving
you a great deal of money. Right this minute your employees have
ideas that would increase your profits, making you and your business
even more money. Right this minute your employees’ brains
are loaded with ideas that would reduce tensions…improve customer
service and customer loyalty…and continuously improve the
quality of your products and services.
Suggestion
Program Leads to Miracles
In a word,
right this minute your employees have inside their brains ideas
that can work miracles for you and your business.Amazingly, most
employers refuse to launch an employee idea and suggestion program.
Or if they do, the suggestion program sputters along and then employee
involvement languishes or dies.
If this is
true for you…consider for a moment just the money you are
losing from the cost-cutting ideas your employees would share with
you. Annual surveys of employee suggestion programs consistently
report that the annual savings from ideas submitted in active suggestion
programs average from over $700 to more than $1,000 per employee
per year.
Suggestion
Program Means Savings
This means
a typical employer with 50 employees and an active suggestion program
can save over $35,000 a year from ideas submitted by employees.
Most of these ideas generate savings year-after-year. So the cumulative
value of ideas over time is substantially greater than the $35,000.
Another way
to look at your losses, from not having an active employee involvement
and suggestion program, is to consider the daily impact. Using the
conservative figure of $700 in annual savings per employee equals
savings of $1.92 per day, per employee, from cost-cutting ideas.
So if you have 50 employees, and you don’t actively solicit
ideas from them, you and your business could be losing $96 a day!
If you have 250 employees and you don’t actively solicit employee
ideas, you and your business could be losing $479 a day…$175,000
a year!
Direct cost-cutting,
money-saving ideas make up only part of all the ideas employees
can offer you. Employers also use suggestion programs to generate
employee ideas to improve quality, to improve morale, to add to
product lines, and to improve safety. |
