I’ve seen a lot of discussion about how to keep employees interested, engaged, and excited at work. When I was first out of college, I worked for an organization that will remain nameless in the customer service department. I hated this job. Let me be clear. I HATED this job. However, one thing that was very interesting about this job was the mindset I had, even outside of work hours, considering that I was miserable.
This particular company had a program in place that rewarded ideas. There were different tiers and monetary rewards based on these tiers. Basically, anyone in the organization could submit an idea on how to do things more effectively, more inexpensively, an idea that would create a better experience for our customers or improve communication between departments internally. It could be anything. If you submitted your idea and it was an original idea, you got a small bonus. If you submitted an original idea and it was implemented, that was where the big bucks were.
This was the neatest program for many reasons. How often do you hear your employees wonder aloud, “Why don’t we do it like this? Our process doesn’t make any sense!” A program like this provides a platform for people to offer solutions instead of just complaining. I watched ideas from the people sitting around me get implemented along with a company wide announcement of how much money this idea saved the organization. Each submission was reviewed by a committee and a personal reply was crafted that explained if the idea was being considered and why or why not. As a result we learned a lot more about the operations of the company as a whole. This education, in turn, created better and better ideas. It became a challenge to come up with a solution rather than just complain. Obviously, a little extra money as an incentive didn’t hurt either. There was also a value in feeling like you had the ability to truly contribute to growing a company.
I have not heard of any company since that has a program like this and I wonder why not? Why wouldn’t you want to have hundreds of people constantly thinking of ways to improve the company? And we did think that way. All the time.
There were days where I would literally hope I would get in a fender bender so I wouldn’t have to go to work, but at the same time I’m at a red light wishing this, I’m thinking about ways to improve the company. It became a permanent mindset and I think it helped me do a better job. All these years later, I’m kind of blown away by how much I hated going to work, but how my wheels were constantly spinning regardless of that fact.
