In Ideawake’s State of Employee Ideas in 2021, which surveyed over 700 employees across the United States on their opinions towards their employer’s ability to listen and take action on their ideas, one of the questions we asked was what prevented employees from sharing their ideas. Here are the top 5 reasons employees stop sharing ideas along with ways you can use Ideawake to alleviate each of them.
Ideas Falling Into a “Black Hole”
One in five (20.8%) of respondents said they stopped sharing ideas because they never heard back from previous ideas they shared. This demonstrates how critical it is to have a structured, formalized communication process in place before and after an idea is submitted.
Here are a few of the ways that Ideawake helps improve transparency and avoid employees getting the feeling that their ideas are falling into a black hole -
- Automated Status Change Emails - Keep idea submitters up to date with automated notifications whenever their idea changes status.
- Announcements – Post announcements to keep the community updated about your innovation initiatives and receive announcements as well as real time notifications in Ideawake and via email.
- Granular Activity Tracking for Submitters – Submitters can track the progress of their idea at every stage of the review and implementation process, helping drastically improve transparency over the most common methods like spreadsheets.
Not Receiving Recognition for an Idea They Previously Shared
According to a study by OfficeTeam, a leading staffing service specializing in the placement of highly skilled administrative professionals, 29% of employees said that they’ve had their ideas stolen at work.
This directly correlates to our State of Employee Ideas Survey, in which 14.7% of respondents said they stopped sharing ideas because they didn’t receive recognition on an idea they previously shared. Ideawake aims to overcome the recognition gap by automating employee recognition through the following features -
- Prizes - Offer a wide variety of incentives to participate in your challenges. Examples include gift cards, lunch with the CEO, or 10 hours a week to test and implement a selected idea.
- Gamification – Incentivize participation by giving users points for completing value added activities to help move ideas forward.
- Timestamp and proof of Ownership – When an idea is submitted, it has a timestamp and a submitter associated with it, making it easy to track submitters of ideas over time.
Not Feeling Comfortable Sharing Ideas & Fear of Manager Retribution
According to a study by DecisionWise, 34% of employees in the US don’t speak up because of fear of retribution. Ideawake has a few features that help eliminate frontline team members fear of retribution and make them comfortable sharing their ideas to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase engagement –
- Anonymous Posting – Allow users to submit their ideas anonymously in order to prevent managers from knowing who is sharing an idea.
- Control Idea Visibility - Take full control of who can see submitted ideas, and when they become visible in your process. As an example, you can limit direct manager visibility of an idea until it has been reviewed by a supervisor.
- Smart Routing - Automatically route ideas that might be critical of a manager straight to their superior for review instead of having them go to the idea submitters direct manager.
Not Knowing Where to Share Ideas
With an ever expanding digital toolset, it’s no wonder why 12.3% of respondents said they didn’t know where to share their ideas. Ideawake enables you to bring innovation to where your teams already live with our Microsoft Teams integration, or leverage some of these other features to bake innovation into your organizations DNA -
- Submit Ideas Via Email - Email has stood the test of time, which is why Ideawake makes it easy to centrally collect ideas directly through your inbox.
- Integrate with Tools You Already Use – Bring Ideawake into the workflow your employees are already used to whether it’s Microsoft Teams, Slack, or Yammer - View Integrations.
- Mobile Friendly - Access Ideawake anytime, anywhere you have an internet connection by computer, smartphone or tablet.