Editor's note: At heart, everyone is an
inventor. We all have ideas and most of these are borne out of problems
that we run across in our daily lives. Your employees are no
different. Working at their jobs between 4-8 hours per day, your
employees uncover ways to improve efficiencies, make their jobs easier, and
improve profitability.
This
of course is magnified in older workers. Having worked for a variety of
employers and having experienced much, experienced workers are not just
dependant ideas from their current job. They bring solutions and
experience from decades of problem-solving and other employers with similar
issues.
Improve Your Bottom Line, Benefit From
Employee Ideas
by: Chuck Yorke
Customers want our products and services to be
better, delivered faster, and produced less expensively. This means that
everything we do needs to be improved. To stay competitive in this world we have
to be better then we were last year and we should be prepared to be better next
year. We must continuously improve.
Engaged employees can show us the way. All
employees can be thinking about how to reduce costs, looking at safety issues,
reducing wastes and improving the environment, while at the same time developing
skills to identify, articulate and communicate those kinds of things.
The Gallup Organization has studied thousands
of companies and surveyed millions of employees. Their research has shown that
very few employees are engaged and that a relatively small increase in the
amount of engaged workers can reap great benefits for a company.
At the lowest level, engaged employees help a
company stay in business and at a higher level employees start thinking about
how they can improve themselves. They can take some ownership over their job;
and also over their own development. It starts people thinking in new and
different ways about the things they do.
In the book, “First, Break All the Rules”
by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman from Gallup, it is noted that the manager,
not anything or anyone else, was most critical in building a strong workforce. A
lot of companies struggle with leadership skills, communications interaction,
and improving management skills. We are now undergoing a paradigm shift as many
organizations are beginning to realize that management’s job is to support the
people doing the work as opposed to dictating how to do the work.
Engaging employees in improving their work
creates new levels of communication and gives the ownership of improvements to
the worker. We now recognize that “you know your job better then management
does because you are the one that does it every day.” Since people are the
expert in their work, who better to come up with ideas to improve it then them.
We all want, need and deserve respect. Engaged people see the fruits of their
labor as other people have accepted their ideas. They now receive positive
feedback for a “job well done.”
Any
process, any product, any service can be made better in some way, somehow. One
plant manager said, “It used to be that my problem solvers were solely the
management team, but now my problem solvers are everybody in the building.”
How can you beat that?
About The Author
Chuck
Yorke is an organizational development and performance improvement specialist,
trainer, consultant and speaker. He is co-author of “All You Gotta Do Is
Ask,” a book which explains how to promote large numbers of ideas from
employees. Chuck may be reached at ChuckYorke@yahoo.com.
