Share
Subscribe
Professor's new book promotes employee ideas
"Ideas are Free" says front-line employees see many opportunities their managers miss.
Alan G. Robinson, business author and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says managers and businesses are overlooking a vast source of information that can provide them with innovation, competitive advantage, and profits – the ideas and observations of their front-line employees. For instance, a flight attendant at American Airlines saved the company $800,000 by suggesting that employees rinse out metal coffee pots during the day instead of replacing them after every flight.
“Instead of being an expense to be cut, employees are a valuable resource,” Robinson says. “They are the ones doing the work, and they see all kinds of things their managers do not. On a daily basis, they see what is frustrating customers, causing waste, or generally holding the organization back. They often know how to improve performance and reduce costs more intelligently than their bosses do.”
Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder, co-authors of the new book “Ideas Are Free: How the Idea Revolution is Liberating People and Transforming Organization,” spent five years and traveled to 17 countries and visited more than 150 organizations conducting their research. They found managers and organizations that actually listen to their employees, receiving millions of ideas and using them to cut costs, increase revenue, save time, improve safety, and boost customer satisfaction.
For example, workers at Good Shepherd Services, a nursing home in northern Wisconsin, noticed that dementia patients often avoid black portions of floors because they perceive these areas as holes. To keep the dementia patients from wandering into unsafe parts areas of the facility, they painted floors there black, prompting the patients to avoid those areas.
But not everything they found was so straight-forward. Robinson and Schroeder say, for example, that small ideas are more valuable than big ones. Why? Because big ideas are often discovered by competitors and countered rather quickly. But small ideas don’t easily migrate to competitors, so they remain proprietary and build sustainable competitive advantage. Also, while big ideas come along rarely and unpredictably, they say, everyone can come up with small ideas all the time, which means these can be measured and managed. And small ideas appearing in patterns can help pinpoint larger problems and opportunities.
Another counterintuitive finding is that the traditional suggestion box just doesn’t work. In fact, offering rewards for ideas often gets companies into trouble, even prompting fraud and dishonesty. Robinson and Schroeder found that workers offer their ideas because they want to make their jobs easier and help the company perform better. The best reward for them is support and recognition and seeing their ideas put into action.
Yet another example of a good small idea is the prison guard in Massachusetts who proposed changing the way pictures were taken of new inmates. Instead of using film, he suggested using digital cameras and storing the images in a database. The idea saved $56,000 in the first year for the Department of Corrections when put into place in its 16 facilities.
Robinson is a professor of finance and operations management at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst. He is the co-author of the bestseller “Corporate Creativity,” which was named “Book of the Year” by the Academy of Human Resource Management and a finalist in the Financial Times/Booz-Allen Hamilton Best Business Book award. He has consulted to more than 100 companies and government agencies in 11 countries.
Schroeder is the founder of two companies, and as an outside CEO, has led the turnarounds of two other firms. He has served for five years on the Board of Examiners of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and is on the Board of Directors of the American Creativity Association. He is currently the Herbert and Agnes Schulz Professor at the College of Business Administration at Valparaiso University.
Alan G. Robinson can be reached at (413) 545-5640 or by e-mail.