A suggestion system is an idea whose time has come—again. It sounds archaic: Little boxes protruding from the wall in different parts of the building with an invitation to submit your idea and a slot for dropping it into the box. Most gathered more dust than ideas, which is why most companies nixed their suggestion systems.

In “Workers of the World, Innovate” (Businessweek, September 7, 2010), Rachael King introduces the next generation of suggestion systems that, naturally, use software rather than little boxes to solicit ideas. The software collects, surveys, sorts, analyzes, and even helps prioritize ideas. AT&T has 40,000 employees signed up for The Innovation Pipeline, and its senior executives fund a handful of the best ideas each quarter.

From a Baldrige perspective, a suggestion system is a good indicator of the quality of your management system in two key areas:

• Employee engagement. Suggestion systems fail because employees ignore them. If your organization has a suggestion system and it’s getting one idea a week, either your employees are not engaged in helping your organization improve or you’ve done a terrible job of promoting your suggestion system. Wainwright Industries, which won the Baldrige Award in 1994, boasted 54 implemented ideas per employee per year! That’s more than one implemented idea per employee per week! Wainwright’s employees are fully engaged in making their company better. According to experts in this area, employees are motivated to be engaged—and to submit suggestions for improvement—by autonomy, mastery, and purpose (see What Drives You?) You can use clever software to make it easy to submit ideas but if you drop the ball on autonomy, mastery, and purpose, your suggestion system will struggle.

• Process improvement. It’s nice to get those big ideas that capture the CEO’s attention, which seems to be the AT&T model, but the Wainwright model is significantly more effective. First, it engages more employees in process improvement, and second, it improves more processes. If every employee is delivering one implemented improvement a week, every process is being improved all the time and employees can see the impact of their ideas.

To establish a system like Wainwright’s, you need processes for collecting, responding to, and acting on every suggestion. Some companies use a 24/7 model: Contact the person who submits an idea within 24 hours to acknowledge that the idea has been received, and then contact the person who submits the idea again within 7 days to explain what action is being taken on the idea. Of course, such a model also means identifying who will do the responding, how ideas will be evaluated, who will act on them, how resources will be allocated if necessary, and how improvement will be measured and communicated.

The most effective suggestion systems exist in organizations that value their employees by giving them the autonomy to improve their processes, the training to master the skills needed to get better, and the sense that what they are doing is critical to the vision and mission of the organization.

To read more about employee engagement, click on these articles:

• Engage Employees to Improve Performance
• Why HR Needs Baldrige
• Recruiting, Retaining, and Engaging
• Valuing Employees – and HR

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