How to utilize your employees knowledge to get new ideas
Read what is essential to get targeted ideas that will work in practice.
If you have tried to invite your employees or colleagues to come up with good ideas, you may have experienced getting something other than what you were hoping for. Maybe you did not get as much as you expected. Or maybe the ideas have been very vague - and seemed more like problems and new goals - than solutions. For example, "we must be better known" or "we must cooperate better" or "we must be more lean "- it is difficult to disagree with, but also very difficult to translate into something concrete.
When that happens, it's often because we have invited people to "bring EVERYTHING" and said that ALL good ideas are welcome. Most of us think that it is important to NOT impose any restrictions - as we might risks overlooking or excluding something...
But the thing is, it's hard to be creative, constructive and concrete if EVERYTHING is open - and therefore it rarely results in anything new. This does not mean that employees can NOT come up with valuable suggestions. On the contrary - it is the emplyees who best know the customers, workflows and products.
If you want to involve employees and translate their knowledge into concrete improvements, there are two things you need to pay attention to:
First, you need to be very clear about WHAT challenge you would like suggestions for. Eg. "How can we retain more customers "or" how can we avoid errors in order processing ".
Second, you should be aware that the ideas do not exist in advance. If they did, you would have already heard them. But what does exist is a lot of knowledge, insight and experience. Therefore, make sure that you have a process that translates the knowledge into proposals that you can implement.
At Benelizer® Ideation Workshop, we have a clear process that guarantees that employees' knowledge are translated into concrete solutions to a relevant challenge. It ensures solution proposals with real gains. Solution proposals that can be implemented and will work in practice and that have high ownership and support from the start.