Since an employee ideas program is a large scale initiative that potentially involves every member of your organization, there are many senior stakeholders that you need to get and maintain buy-in from.
This can be great, but oftentimes needing to incorporate feedback from so many different people causes unintended consequences that set your program up for failure in the long-term. Here are the six most common mistakes we see organizations make that cause participation rates in their programs to go down over time.
Requiring Too Much Effort for Initial Idea Submission
Your initial submission form should not require more than 5 fields. Additionally, you should not require a PowerPoint or full business case to be included within those 5 fields.
The reason that organizations start with or eventually implement longer submission forms is to get higher quality submissions, but this is going to have a drastic impact on the submission rate you’ll see from team members.
According to a study by QuickSprout, conversion rates on forms drop by about 11% for each additional field added after the first four fields. We suggest the following fields as a best practice when employees initially share an idea –
- Idea Title
- Idea Description
- Problem Your Idea Solves
- Area Your Idea Relates To (Department, Business Unit, Etc)
- Benefits Your Idea Provides
If the goal is to minimize the effort for idea screeners or evaluators in reviewing low-quality submissions, what we suggest is adding on a secondary submission that’s required to be completed before an idea is eligible to be reviewed by an idea screener (this would be accomplished using a refinement stage in Ideawake).
Not Baking Promotion Into Existing Workflows
Doing a one-off communication prompting employees to share ideas will cause a spike in participation, but for the program to sustain itself it needs to be front and center in team members daily workflows. Here are a few considerations to get the program naturally in front of team members and maximize participation from promotion:
- Recurring Communications: Most companies have a weekly newsletter that goes out to the organization. Including a direct link at the top of your newsletter makes it easy for team members to find and engage with your employee ideas program.
- Existing Daily Workflows: We’ve seen a lot of success installing Ideawake in Microsoft Teams as well as in SharePoint sites. Additionally, prompting managers to bring up the program to their direct reports on a weekly basis during team huddles helps build idea sharing directly into your culture.
- High Traffic Physical Spaces: Using 24×36 posters or 5×7 smaller handouts with QR codes in high traffic areas like break rooms or on the manufacturing floor have proven to be very helpful in keeping the program top of mind for team members.
- During Training & Onboarding: Having a module which focuses on the employee ideas program during all team member training and onboarding (including having them register and login to your platform) will reduce friction when they are prompted to participate through any of the other mediums we highlighted above.
For more information on the full menu of promotion options you can tap into, see our Promotion and Communications Options Menu.
Not Rewarding Employees for Qualified Ideas
50% of organizations don’t provide any type of tangible rewards for participation in their employee ideas programs. Yet, a 2015 Study by Gallup found that employee idea programs with tangible rewards had participation rates that were approximately 40% higher than those without any incentives.
Although there are several reasons for not including rewards in your program like tax ramifications and incentivizing innovation vs. making it truly organic, we believe that based on the data incentivizing idea sharing and collaboration is something that can have a material impact on your idea programs participation and long-term outcomes.
If you’re looking for inspiration on types of rewards you can offer, check out our resource 25+ Prize and Reward Examples that Will Improve Participation in Your Employee Idea Program.
Doing “Always Open” Idea Programs vs. Idea Campaigns or Challenges
Many organizations just have a suggestion system open all year round for team members to submit ideas but from our internal data – programs that incorporate time based challenges or campaigns that are targeted on a specific topic see higher participation rates as well as higher idea quality.
The reason for this isn’t rocket science – having time-based campaigns enables you to create scarcity, do more effective short-term marketing pushes, and give employees new problems to approach vs. continuously pushing for them to share “any idea to improve the organization.”
For more about challenges and how to create great challenge statements, please see our resource on Introduction to Innovation Challenges and Creating Effective Challenge Statements.
Not Giving Employees Status Updates Quickly and Not Sending Out Company-Wide Updates Frequently
This is the biggest mistake we see companies make when trying to keep recurring participation up in their employee idea programs. The number one reason (22%) that employees stop sharing ideas according to our 2021 State of Employee Ideas Survey is because they feel like an idea they shared previously fell into a “black hole.”
It’s a little known fact that employees care less about whether or not their idea is implemented and more about the speed at which they receive feedback on where their idea is going and why. Providing communication and transparency is a must if you want to set your program up for long-term success. If you’re interested in other reasons employees stop sharing ideas, see The Top 5 Reasons Employees Stop Sharing Ideas.
Focusing Too Much on Big “I” Innovation Instead of Small “i” Innovation
Leadership Teams often dream of creating the next iPhone as a result of launching an employee ideas program. That would be great and it can happen, but innovation is a muscle that needs to be built up over time and proper resourcing to build truly “transformational” innovation is something that’s going to require more than the budgeted time of 1 to 2 FTE’s.
What we’ve found works best to get actual financial impact out of your employee ideas program while also helping maximize cultural impact in the short and mid-term is focusing on “Quick Wins” which are easy to implement and have a measurable financial impact. This helps in several ways –
- You implement more ideas, showing employees that if they take the time to share their ideas, there’s a higher probability of them getting implemented.
- You have an actual financial impact you can demonstrate in the first 12 – 24 months of the program, making it easier to justify continuing the program to sponsors and even expanding budget allocated to the program.
- It’s much less stressful for the team managing the program as you can actually get things done vs. having a few ideas drag out for 6 – 18 months.
Avoiding these 6 common mistakes can have a drastic impact on your participation rate in your employee ideas program. That being said, actually getting buy in to make the changes to avoid these mistakes is much easier said than done.
If you want to discuss any of these points further including how to approach leadership in a way that will help you get the approvals needed to make these changes, we’re here to help. To connect, you can schedule a strategy call with our team here – Schedule a Strategy Call with Ideawake.