Harnessing the power of your employees

Naturally maximising productivity and efficiency is something every Singaporean business needs to do, especially in the uncertain economic climate of today; thus waste elimination is crucial. The biggest opportunity lies in unused human talent.

Too many organisations allow employees to ‘hang their brain on the gate post’ when they come to work, providing little encouragement or in some cases even discouraging their people from getting involved in contributing ideas that will improve the business.

A company’s single most powerful competitive lever is its people.

How the organisation harnesses that ‘brainpower’ will significantly influence its success. But how do you go about getting individuals to contribute their ideas?

From my experience over the last 20 years I have identified some key dos and don’ts

• Do ask frontline staff. Often the people closest to where the work gets done are the ones who best understand what is not working well, and given appropriate encouragement and opportunity are the ones who can provide solutions.
• Don’t make it too hard to submit an idea. I once worked with an organisation that asked employees to complete a four-page document and submit a business case just to raise a suggestion. If it is too hard people won’t bother!
• Do encourage employees to submit ideas for small improvements. It is far easier to make lots of 1% improvements than it is to find that one magic 100% improvement. 
• Don’t ask for ideas if you are not ready to implement some of them. Simply generating large volumes of ideas and suggestions but not executing them is pointless. Plus employees can find it disheartening being asked to contribute and then seeing nothing happen. It is vital to allocate people and resources to implementation.
• Do provide feedback to everyone who provides ideas. Seeing an idea disappear into a black hole never to emerge is not something that will motivate an employee to submit another idea.
• Don’t take too long to evaluate ideas. Make decisions at the front line as much as possible. This will result in better decisions, speed up implementation and prevent the suggestion process from becoming a bureaucracy.
• Do ask employees to contribute ideas and suggestions about a particular issue or opportunity. Ideally the improvement process should be aligned with the company strategy, so this should provide a focus. Concentrating on a particular theme or area may reduce the number of submitted ideas but it’s all about quality not quantity. This approach should result in more being used, as it is easier to focus implementation resources on one area.
• Don’t invent elaborate reward schemes for suggestions. Keep it simple or it will create cost and remember that the simplest - and often most appreciated - form of recognition is to say thank you.
• Do make time for employees to spend on improvement. Reduce the time spent on ‘firefighting’ by fixing core business processes and making ‘the routine things happen routinely’.

Most organisations only scratch the surface of the potential of their employees. Can you afford to leave all that brainpower untapped?

Stuart Harman, Partner, Oliver Wight