How To Encourage Workers To Suggest Innovation? 281
An anonymous reader writes "The software company where I work has an Innovation and Knowledge program that encourages workers to provide ideas for new products and suggestions to improve the work place, productivity or welfare. The ideas and suggestions are evaluated by a board that decides whether they should be implemented or not. The group of workers with more ideas participates in a raffle to receive a prize. I would like to know what other programs people have seen like this and how they differ. What is the best way to encourage workers to suggest new products to be made / researched by the company?"
Re:empowerment 20% of the time. (Score:5, Informative)
A guy named Frederick Hertzberg suggested that employees are motivated by a hierarchy of needs.
They start at the very low levels: Physical Environment, Salary, Job Security, Status, etc.
Then they proceed to higher levels. Recognition is actually the second highest motivator, and it certainly is a motivator for some. But Google is actually a good example of Hertzberg's highest motivator which is achievement: people are motivated by the work itself. Self-actualization.
That was Abraham Maslow.
Air Force IDEA program (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ownership interest (Score:5, Informative)
It's common in "real" engineering contexts to reward the suggester with a percentage of the value of the idea. For example, a chemical plant might have a suggestion box (anyone can contribute, engineer or not) for lowering the cost of the plant's processes. For any idea they use they'll pay you 10% of the money saved, capped at $1 million. This is actually fairly common, and most plants have a history of large payouts.
Ownership doesn't come into it: no one's getting stock. But a $1 million check is still a great motivator. You just need a reward proportional to the value of the idea, plus a clear way to establish ownership of suggestions (the second guy to suggest the $1 million idea is going to be annoyed).
Re:This is a good start (Score:1, Informative)
A company's success is the sum of its parts, and the way things are currently structured, I can't see a single thing that would motivate an employee to suggest ideas that would put a new yacht or summer home in the hands of someone else.
Thank you for saying so succinctly what I've been arguing for years.
I believe the company stock plan (making all employees "owners", so they'll work really, really hard) is one of the biggest scams ever foisted off on the American worker.
Let's say I come up with an idea that causes the company stock price to increase by one dollar. For my 400 shares, bought at some discount, I gain 400 dollars. But the CEO and the other high rollers, who were each given 50,000 shares as recruitment bonuses, not to mention later free grants of stock, make $50,000 off my idea. Some amplification factor, no?
Have a look in Yahoo finance or elsewhere that insider trading is documented. I wondered how some of these guys, in any given month, could cash in or dispense as gifts, some thousands of shares. I also wondered what it said about their faith in the company. That question is generally dismissed as simply "prudent diversification in their stock portfolios". But I still think it's just as much a lack of faith in the company's future prospects.
It's bad enough that CEOs made some 40 or 50 times the pay of the lowest paid employee, but it's now up in the range of 400 times in many cases. I worked for a company where the incoming CEO was guaranteed $4M per year even if he had to be taken out and shot for non-performance. If he escaped that fate, he was eligible for up to another $8M per year, in addition to initial and ongoing stock grants. This was in a company with only a few thousand employees.
Sorry, I see no reason why I should bust my ass to aggrandize this son of a bitch.
While I have your kind attention, I should mention that another major scam on the worker is the "attrition" concept as applied to downsizing, especially in a union environment. The corporations started this scam years ago to mute the protests of the workers. "We won't lay anyone off -- we'll just abolish jobs as people leave the company." Bullshit -- apparently the unions didn't realize they lost power with each job lost to attrition. I also worked for a large railroad that had some 60K employees when I started in the 60s. By the time the outfit was sold in the 90s, they were down to something under 10K employees. Since much of management and many exempt employees came from the operating and IT divisions, they had plenty of talent to run the trains and computers pretty well in case of a strike.
Another sweet one they pulled was against the security force. Originally, railroad cops were sworn law enforcement and carried sidearms. Their uniforms were kind of olive drab, but they still looked otherwise like city cops.
Somewhere along the way, they offered the cops the chance to give up the union and get a raise by becoming exempt employees. The offer was accepted. The uniforms went away and were replaced with business suits.
Within six months, they were all fired when their now not-union-protected jobs were outsourced to Burns Security minimum wage wannabe cops, armed only with walkie talkies.