A solid foundation of employee involvement activities is critical to achieving the continuous improvement goals. One of those elements is the improvement suggestions program.
What is an improvement suggestions program?
An employee suggestion program gives your employees a formal way to express their ideas to improve the processes of the workplace conditions. Also, it is a way to channel those ideas from the work floor to management.
A well manage suggestion plan serves two purposes. The first is to formalize the suggestions process. The second is to provide documentation of individual contributions. With the former, leadership can prioritize ideas aligned with the company goals. The ladder provides documentation for the year-end performance review.
Are you ready to lunch this program?
Why do you want to lunch an improvement suggestions program? If you want to check a box from your to-do list, do not do it. Are you receiving a steady number of suggestions? If ideas are not flowing from employees to supervisors and managers, maybe you are not there yet. On the other hand, if enthusiasm is growing and team members are communicating ideas constantly, it is time to launch your suggestions program.
Characteristics of an improvement suggestions program
But the improvement suggestions program is much more than a suggestions box. Above all, careful design of the process is important. For instance, the following are factors that describe a successful suggestions plan.
- Hassle-free process – Make it easy to participate by providing a simple suggestions form.
- Clear and fair rules – Same rules for everybody, explain how you would assign a value or impact to the results of the estimated improvements. Moreover, explain the rewards and recognition system tied to the suggestions propositions and results. Also, establish guidelines for the type of topics open to suggestions and how ideas are prioritized.
- Quick feedback – Establish a standard, such as responding to suggestions within one week. Even more, create the standard for what information should be included in the response and how the feedback will be provided.
- Program promotion and evaluation – Check how the system is doing versus the standards and look for areas for improvement. Furthermore, create a measuring or evaluation system and publish the results. For example, the total number of suggestions and participation percentage
Don’ts
A badly designed program will hurt your continuous improvement transformation. Once it loses credibility it will be undertaken to win it back. Put simply, avoid hurting the continuous improvement journey and the business bottom-line. The following are mistakes that should avoid.
- Create a complicated form requesting too much information.
- Take too much time to answer, don’t be the bottleneck of the process!
- Have a homogenous evaluation team, include people from different functions and levels.
- Fail to follow the program rules.
Summary
Team involvement activities are critical to achieving improvement goals in the areas of quality, cost, and delivery. For that reason, their engagement is decisive to achieve the continuous improvement goals. Certainly, it is important to create and maintain a fair and simple program that motivates participation.