Resurrecting the Suggestion System

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…

Employee Hierarchy of Needs

Money isn’t everything, especially when it comes to motivating employees—but it’s also not irrelevant.

Chip Conley’s Joie de Vivre hotel chain in the San Francisco Bay area struggled after 9/11. In an interview on FastCompany’s Web site (click here), Conley talks about turning to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid to understand how to connect to the higher needs of employees, customers, and investors. He developed an employee pyramid with three basic themes: “survival at the base, succeed at the middle, and transformation at the top. Applying that to employees, it’s money, recognition, and meaning.”

Conley and his leaders worked on building a culture of recognition and meaning:

• Senior leaders ended their meetings on a positive note.
• They created an environment of recognition throughout the organization.
• They made a rule that the person giving recognition needs to be from a different department than the person being recognized.
• They added questions to the twice-annual work climate surveys measuring performance on the top-of-the-pyramid attributes.
• They held offsite retreats with line level employees to promote recognition and instill meaning.
• They measured relationships to help evaluate manager effectiveness.

Joie de Vivre’s focus on the employee pyramid seems to have produced results: It was named one of the top ten “Best Places to Work in…

Engage Employees to Improve Performance

A study of 245 firefighters and their supervisors has shown that job engagement is a significant predictor of task performance and organizational citizenship behavior. The study, which is behind a firewall, is described by Bret L. Simmons on his blog.

The researchers measured job engagement through 18 questions organized by physical engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement. According to the article abstract, they found that “engagement, conceptualized as the investment of an individual’s complete self to a role, provides a more comprehensive explanation of relationships with performance relative to well-known concepts that reflect narrower aspects of the individual’s self.” The researchers were able to evaluate the impact of other factors including job involvement, job satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation on performance and behavior; they concluded these factors did not predict performance and behavior while engagement did.

According to Simmons, the researchers identified three antecedents of engagement: value congruence, perceived organizational support, and core self-evaluations. In other words, hire people who share and support your organization’s mission and values and who are self-sufficient and confident, and then provide development opportunities that align with your organizational values and your employees’ developmental needs.

In “Bottom-Line Value of Employee Engagement,” I wrote about a Gallup report that came to…

Workforce Well-Being

The Baldrige Criteria ask a number of questions that get at the well-being of your workforce, including questions about employee satisfaction and health and the support you provide through services and benefits. Scientists at Gallup have been studying workforce well-being for more than 50 years. Two of these scientists wrote a book about it called Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements.

According to Gallup’s research, there are universal elements of well-being that differentiate thriving from struggling. They have grouped them in five categories:

• Career Well-Being: How you occupy your time or how much you like what you do every day.
• Social Well-Being: Having strong relationships and love in your life.
• Financial Well-Being: Effectively managing your economic life.
• Physical Well-Being: Having good health and enough energy to get things done.
• Community Well-Being: A sense of engagement with your community.

According to the book’s authors, when these factors are fully realized, people thrive.

An article on the Gallup Management Journal (click here) explains why this matters. Most of us believe that happy and healthy people get sick less often than miserable people. According to Gallup’s data, workers with the lowest well-being scores cost their companies $28,800 a year in lost productivity from sick days. In contrast, workers with the highest well-being…