If you’ve launched an Idea Management program in your company, you’re on the cusp of using a powerful business tool to dramatically increase innovation within your firm. An Idea Management program is the ideal way to tap into the power of your most valuable asset, your employees.
However, if employees aren’t engaging with your Idea Management program, you likely won’t maximize your potential returns.
The concept of maximizing employee engagement in your IM program is relatively straightforward- you need to
actively promote the use of your platform before and during the rollout of your program. Here at Ideawake, we’ve created a system to help our clients with the planning, promotion, and launch of every Idea Management program we host that has helped them reach a 60%-80% engagement rate consistently. This system involves the use of multiple tactics for the promotional component of the system that help us reach that high target engagement rate.
Here are 2 promotional strategies you can use to maximize employee engagement with an Idea Management program.
Using current digital communications for promotion
In today’s business environment, it’s likely that your employees are spending most, if not all their time on their computers for work. Given that’s the case, it’s imperative that you establish a promotional presence on your current digital communication platforms.
The most important platform to promote to your employees is email. Email has long been the standard of business communication, and according to a
2018 Adobe Consumer Email survey that hasn’t changed, as respondents reported spending an average of 3.1 hours per workday checking email. To most effectively use email to promote your
idea management program, emails shouldn’t just be sent out randomly. Instead, you need to develop email sequences that introduce your program, encourage users to try the platform, and take employees through the next stages of your program when necessary.
If your idea management program is set up properly, you should have one or a few champions for the program that can help promote your program in a more personal, responsive manner than pre-set email sequences. Champions can be flexible and use email, chat, and more to encourage employees to use your platform, promote early results to gain traction, or help employees overcome firm-specific barriers they encounter during the program.
For larger companies, you can promote your idea management program on the internal company website, just like any other important information for all employees.
The key to any digital promotion is to promote frequently and consistently, as the amount of clutter employees face on email and others can be high, and the cost of promotion is relatively low.
Promoting your online program, offline
It’s the digital era of business, but that doesn’t mean you should be ignoring offline promotion of your Idea Management program. You can skip over the digital clutter of email by distributing physical promotional materials around your launch date, reinforcing the messaging you’ve sent digitally.
Finally, you’ll want to reinforce all the promotional tactics you’ve employed with face-to-face communication. It’s essential that before your platform goes live, you have a company-wide kickoff event to introduce the program, show the process to employees, answer any early questions they have, and generate buzz around the launch. Taking this time out of the workday shows that the program is a company priority.
After launch, a good practice is to dedicate a small amount of time in recurring department or team meetings to discussion around your program. This allows you to answer more nuanced questions about the program and keep it top-of-mind while the program is going on.
While each
innovation strategy can increase engagement on its own, using both with a diverse set of tactics in each will maximize the engagement rate you see. Ideawake sees high engagement rates consistently by combining these strategies with expert assistance from our team in building a promotional plan tailored to your business.
