There is an abundance of of published information regarding guidelines for and benefits of an employee suggestion program. A few informative articles can be found at the Community for Human Resource Management, Chart Your Course International, and About.com.
There is a very simple context that is overlooked in most discussions about how to establish a successful employee suggestion program. Suggestions are much easier to implement if they are viewed as a solution to a frustration. A frustration in the context of business can be defined as an undesirable pattern of events that can be eliminated by installing or improving a system. It is preferable to have employees list frustrations rather than suggestions because simply listing a suggestion may not be getting to the heart of what their problem is. Simply listing a suggestion does not reveal the true core of the problem and eliminates an opportunity to provide a systematic solution in a larger context. As an example a suggestion to
‘Buy better coffee’
does not reveal the source of an individual’s concern about the situation and limits the company’s choices to find a solution. A frustration listed as
‘I get queasy when I drink the coffee in the morning’
leaves the door wide open for the company to investigate the situation and identify all of the possible solutions. This would lead to an investigation of the entire process and equipment used to make the coffee, etc. to determine if the coffee itself is indeed to problem, or if something else is causing the undesirable result.
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