Employee suggestion schemes may sound old fashioned but they remain one of the best sources for ideas for improvement, cost saving and innovation. Bosses are increasingly turning back to their staff to find more suggestions. Employee suggestion schemes are not new. Toyota started with the concept in 1951 and now receives over one million ideas a year. The Sony PlayStation was the result of one engineer’s suggestion.
Jamie Dimon, who runs America’s largest bank, JP Morgan Chase has asked employees of the bank to email him examples of waste. “I’m just asking you to sit down and have a little fun thinking about the stupid stuff we do, the bureaucratic stuff we do — about things you would change if you were able to change them.” Andy Jassy, the chief executive of Amazon, in his letter to shareholders wrote that last year he had asked “teammates to send me bureaucracy examples that they were experiencing. I’ve received almost 1,000 of these emails, and read every single one.” He claims he has made over 375 changes based on this feedback.
Jermaine Lapwood, director of customer innovation at the clothes retailer Primark said, “I don’t think that we have all the answers within our head office and we need to unlock the power of the ideas within our 80,000 colleague base.” So, Primark runs campaigns asking staff for ideas. A shop assistant in the Netherlands said Primark needed to reintroduce the slit at the back of its trenchcoats. It turns out that the slit is very useful for cyclists. Primark reintroduced the slit and sales in the Netherlands went up. . Any Primark employee who has a suggestion accepted is rewarded by leaving their day job temporarily and spending time at head office bringing their idea to life.
At Balfour Beatty, the construction company, has five full-time staff who work on its staff suggestion which is called My Contribution. It says that last year 2,000 ideas were submitted with 24 per cent of the workforce submitting something. Of those, 271 were deemed good enough to act upon, saving the company £3.2 million and 53,800 hours. One idea was from the Tilbury flood barrier site. Instead of the normal practice of installing cabling for high-powered lights during construction, use solar-powered lights. This saved £9,600 and three days of digging trenches for the cabling.
In most schemes, all ideas submitted on the platform can be seen by other workers. They can either add comments or vote for it to be implemented. This collaborative approach brings better employee engagement and better ideas.
Based on an article by Harry Wallop in the Times