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Highly paid unknown consultants can get your people to talk, complain, whine, moan and spill their guts about everything wrong with your company; why can’t you? Third party consultants can come in and get surprisingly simple answers in a just a few days, charging high fees with no previous knowledge of your company. Why is this?
How do strangers get your employees to talk? (Do not taint the answers.) Why can strangers get your people to talk and you cannot? Why is it that your own management cannot do this on a daily basis? The answer is simple. Your managers need to learn to ask questions in a nonjudgmental way. They are not trained and need to learn to ask respectfully and learn the fine art of judging no one when seeking information. Learn to ask questions without bias. It is difficult and your managers need to practice this.
Some employees are quick to respond, some are not. Some employees answer questions quickly because they are creative and have ideas readily available. Others will only react when provoked with questions that stir their imagination and trigger their responses.
Sometimes money works, sometimes it does not. Handing out money helps to provoke interest, excitement and draws interest into the process. Giving incentive payments for thinking outside the normal course of business is just the course of business. Naysayers who feel employees are paid enough deserve all of the nonresponse they get.
Incentives are small, compared to the potential benefits you derive. Incentives for ideas are nothing compared to the long term benefits a firm can derive. If you get lousy answers, they stem from lousy questions. If you end up paying a lot of money for ideas, it is because you are making lots of money from those ideas. Do not complain. Try it.
Do not delay; start asking unbiased simple questions now. Ask your employees something new each week and vary the questions to change the game. Try a series of open ended questions on different subjects to generate the curiosity of different groups within your organization. The answers do not have to be final or perfect; you want thought provoking thought and fresh reflection of what your company is doing and what it possible.
Ask more than one question to capture the attention of different groups of respondents. If you give your employees multiple questions, you will more likely get multiple groups thinking at the same time. Change the program frequently and hop from subject to subject. Altering the target will provide the ongoing interest that will likely yield the most employee suggestions. When they have finished thinking about your questions for a week or so, throw two or three more new questions at them to contemplate, analyze and study.
Retain all the suggestions you receive because some may trigger more ideas from others. Do not rely on the decision of only one or two judges for this weekly contest. Have all of the ideas reviewed by a second, unrelated group of people with different backgrounds (engineering, inside sales, research and development, etc.) to get different perspectives. Conduct this second review because someone may be stirred by a key word or a specific response, and think of another great cost saving or product improvement idea.
Post the winning ideas. Let others contemplate these proposals because they may provoke further thought. You do not know where ideas will come from so keep them visible in front of people. You may even want to publish them (nameless), which sometimes causes others who read them and to think of another issue or idea that they will throw out.
