The suggestion box sends some not so subtle messages. One is that ideas are not part of everyone's job - they are optional. Employees are not expected to come up with ideas for improvement. But just in case they do, there is the box on the wall.
In other words, the people on the front lines are not expected to think. Some managers behave as if their employees should "check their brains" at the door, and they are to do only what they are told to do. (A French colleague of ours said many of the managers he deals with don't even think their employees have anything to check.)
The irony is that everyone has useful ideas. To demonstrate this point, let's look at the experience of an organization called Opportunity Enterprises (OE). OE is a not-for-profit organization that services the needs of mentally and physically challenges people. They are also a very progressive corporation that uses open book management and an excellent employee idea program to provide a highly empowering work environment. One of the truly unique things OE has done is to drive their improvement team effort right down into their client base. Client teams, consisting of people who have difficulty even writing, develop improvement ideas. The result has been solutions to problems that OE never even knew they had.
One of my favorites involved changes in the internal doors. Because many of OE's clients are in wheel chairs, they sometimes banged into each other when opening doors. The solution by a client team -- put windows in each door low enough for people in wheel chairs to see through the door and be seen by people on the other side. That problem and solution came from a perspective - sitting in a wheel chair - that management didn't even share.
If OE's clients can solve problems, every employee can.
It is time we not only think outside of the box, but shoot the box and bury it as well. Everyone should be expected to come up with improvement ideas as part of their job.
Related Stories: | Topics:Innovation, guest hosts: robinson + schroeder, Nonprofits and NGOs |
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Recent Comments | 3 Total
June 2, 2004 at 4:39pm by Robert Alan Black
Dean
Your points in IDEAS ARE FREE are well taken and many excellent examples are given to help readers and their companies to get past the stereotypic problems with "suggestion boxes" and most "suggestion systems". In my attempts over nearly 30 years to help clients expand and enrich the creative thinking and problem solving skills of ALL their employees one of my primary sources of challenges and resistance have been from the "jaded" people. They typically have been the managers (who rarely ever have worked on the line and worked their way up), many to most college educated supervisors, managers or other specific positions that require a degree to earn. Why them? Because they have been the ones who internally, knowingly or not, believe that only college educated or people with positiions can come out with valuable ideas or solutions. Heaven forbid that a man or woman who has been doing a job for many years under someone else's control could possbily think.
June 2, 2004 at 5:29pm by Dean Schroeder
Alan,
Your observation certainly corresponds with what we see. That's why a little management humility is so important to getting ideas. When I look back at some of my early career behavior, when I was fresh out of my undergraduate program in engineering, I was part of the problem. I thought that I should know the answers myself.
Some of that ego still slides in sometimes, and it can be a fight to keep it out. Trusting people in the trenches can be difficult - perhaps because we can find life experiences as educated managers and our positions in companies mean we are distant from those in the trenches.
June 2, 2004 at 6:22pm by Heath Row
I've always thought it amusing that our parent company's online idea system was called the "Virtual Suggestion Box." Is the box virtual? My suggestions? "Thank you for your input! We'll consider it in essence or effect -- but not in fact."