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| Tap
Into Employee Ideas by Jim Collison |
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What’s a major impediment to a successful employee idea and suggestion program? What can keep employers from initiating successful employee involvement programs? Failure to tap into and use their employee’s brainpower! Many employers are threatened by “thinking-deficiency disorder,” according to T. Quinn Spitzer, Jr., of the Kepner-Tregoe consulting firm that conducted a survey with the title “How Much Brainpower Are We Really Using?” This “thinking-deficiency disorder” is a “pervasive degenerative condition characterized by the significant underutilization of an organization’s full intellectual potential,” Spitzer said. Sounds like now we’ve got corporate Alzheimer’s blocking the success of employee involvement and employee idea suggestion programs. Why this thinking crisis? Brains Not Tapped for Employee Ideas Kepner-Tregoe’s
survey of 1,414 hourly employees and managers,
from more than 1,000 companies, found that |
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employees and managers believe their organizations operate on less than half of their collective brainpower. Employee brainpower is underutilized because of time pressures, organizational politics, and because employers fail to involve employees in decisions, according to the survey results. Many employees said their employers are lacking in rewards and recognition for good thinking, and pay too little attention to developing employees’ thinking skills. Survey respondents felt that hourly employees and managers should receive more training to improve their thinking skills. Employees must know how to access and analyze complex situations, make decisions, solve problems and act upon potential opportunities, according to Spitzer. “Most ideas are immediately vetoed,” one respondent observed. Seek Employee Suggestions “Employees are telling us that they have a lot more capacity for helping the business, and the business isn’t using it,” said Spitzer. A manager commented, “Our organization is run by two or three people. No one else who understands and does the actual work is consulted.” Other managers’ comments showed they’re disturbed by their employers’ inability to tackle concerns systematically. Examples: “We focus on the urgent, ignoring or deferring the important.” “We pick the ten worst problems and go like hell to fix them all at once. We should pick the number one problem and fix it, then go to number two.” Some managers
suggested a company-wide problem-solving tool or process would eliminate
most mistakes. Examples: “Too much guessing. Work has to be
done over and over, almost daily.” “There’s never
time to do something correctly, but we seem to always have time
to do it over.” “Decisions are made before thinking
about the best way to proceed.” |
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