Suggestions can come from different events at the workplace, small brainstorms at a department or some time at the staff meetings dedicated to suggestions of ideas and renovations.

Have a monthly luncheon where employees are asked to present suggestions.

The low managers that are close to the reporting level can collect ideas and suggestions and bring them to the managers meeting.

A traditional program will have the suggestions boxes with its bad reputation. The suggestion boxes unpopularity comes from the time consuming and difficulties to keep the box up. People will have more hard feelings than positive once if the suggestions will not be responded shortly and clearly, and will lose interest in presenting new suggestions.

Appoint a Cross-Functional review team that has a limit of 48 hours to acknowledge a suggestion. This team should have the power to reject or implement the suggestions for its review.

Consider multiple department reviews of the suggestion, starting with finance the team has to meet regularly and the suggestion information distributed early enough for the team to study it before the meeting. 

Do not overcharge the team with many meeting it will make the participation part of the day to day work, A rotation between your managers will make the team fresh and keep its interest in renovation and changes. Be careful not to choose managers that will block changes because they ate changes.

Here we have some more ideas for the organization of employees suggestions procedure, beyond the classic suggestion box.

Write and publish your guidelines for the process of submission and review of employees suggestions,

What’s an Employee’s Role in Innovation?

Once you have your plan for processing reviewing and submission of your employee’s suggestions, publish it to all your workforce. Share with your employees the guidelines and goals to be accomplished by your employee suggestion program. program

Establish Guidelines for the Employee Suggestion Process

Your guidelines will have to show what are the topics that you prefer to have a suggestion for improvement. Topics like productivity, cost saving, the quality of the products you make, raising revenue and morale and ethics issues.

Having no guidelines or criteria will make you an impossible situation, you will find too many suggestions deal with ice-creme machine or popcorn-maker in the dinner. Make sure that your people know what you want to improve and willing to recognize has a valid suggestion for the improvement of your business and the employee’s productivity.

The Employee Suggestion Must Provide Details About the Improvement

A suggestion is not only one sentence idea like “Let’s buy new computers”A proposal will have to provide a detailed explication made by the proposer, showing why and what is the advantage of his idea and how it will benefit your organization. A good suggestion will need a clear plan for the way to implement it. Suggesting to buy a hen that leis golden eggs will need to show where to buy this hen, what food it will need to be fed so the eggs will come in a golden color.

Employee suggestion should have the “why” and “how” of the impact of the ideas on the organization. Costs of implementation and saving on traditional costs make your suggestion process simple and easy to use. Do not make it have a lot of paperwork filling an infinity of forms.

Employee’s Own Job Suggestions should be treated differently

Suggestions that are about the employee’s own job are more important to deal with, and have to be dealt with special care. It is expected to be more effective because it comes from the employee immediate work witch he know better and cares more than general ideas.