This article is part of the Path of Employee Feedback from my previous article “What is the Role of Human Resources”. I find that I’m always making recommendations to my clients to use their paid employees more. Underutilizing your employee’s brain power when you’re paying for their time already, is a waste.
You should maximize your employee’s brain power and ideas because it builds loyalty, creates buy-in, gives a sense of ownership, gives a sense of pride, and gives the employer more value for the wages paid to current employees.
Remember to always preface all questions or request ideas with the caveat that their responses may not be used soon or at all. This will help manage expectations and reduce confusion.
Read below to get more details.
Loyalty
Ask an employee a question about how the organization is run and amazing things happen! The employee will give you some ideas and they will be happy you asked. People like to be needed and they like when they can contribute to the process.
If you ask questions often and they see that occasionally their ideas are used this will slowly create loyalty.
The book “The 7 Intuitive Laws of Employee Loyalty
” by Heather R. Younger on Amazon is a great resource to help you create more loyalty in your organization.
Buy-in
With the creation of more loyalty employees will also have more buy-in for new initiatives. Most organizations push ideas and change down from the top. Often without consideration of the current systems and employees.
As your new ideas and changes are seen to come from the employees, they will accept them more readily. Participation in the new idea process will increase also.
Ownership
Employees that are engaged in helping to create or update organization policies, systems, processes, and strategic direction feel an increasing feeling of ownership. In most cases, employees will never become owners under our capitalist economic system, but they can feel like they are.
A current real work example of how to get employees engaged is by having them help with emergency plans for COVID-19, pandemics, or the seasonal flu. Learn more by reading my article “My Employee Has COVID-19“.
Pride
With the feeling of ownership comes the feeling of pride. I know when I started my first business, I was very proud of what I did. Now imagine if you have ten or a hundred employees all proud to be working for your organization.
The positive word of mouth spread by your employees may drastically improve your organization in multiple ways. Better employee applications. Better business opportunities. Better performance. More revenue.
Path to career advancement
Allowing employees to voice ideas and contribute to organizational changes and growth can uncover some hidden gems. The creativity of some employees may surprise you. An employee with good ideas may be better suited to a different role.
We can’t pigeonhole employees to their job titles. A good idea may mean a good brain. Organizations need every good brain they can get. So, track the really good ideas and consider the contributing employee for promotions or lateral moves in the future.
More for wages
As hinted above, you can get more for your buck (wages). Sometimes organizations have projects that need to get done so outside consultants or expensive new employees are hired.
If you can identify some employees that can be trained and moved into new roles because of their history of great ideas and good contributions at meetings, then you may save some money. It is cheaper to give a merit pay increase than a whole new salary and benefits to a new employee.
What next?
Start asking your employees for their thoughts and ideas for some of your business issues. Ask for feedback about every new initiative. Feedback is very important if you don’t want to get behind the times. The benefits of asking for feedback and ideas are large!
Learn more about collecting your employee’s ideas by reading our next article “Hired Brains: Top Ways to Maximize the Collection of Your Employee’s Ideas“.
For human resources support in Canada, click here to book a free HR needs assessment now. If you’re on a budget, consider joining my Patreon to ask unlimited HR questions. If you need HR advice sooner, book a consultation via Fiverr here.
All articles on this website were written by Ian Hopfe. Connect with Ian on LinkedIn!