Tap
Into Employee Ideas
by Jim Collison
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 thatemployees 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.” |
