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What kind of "suggestion box" does your company have?
How are new ideas and innovations of products, processes or company culture funneled through your organization?
Are the ideas routed through technical managers or HR?
Who makes the decisions on which ideas to implement and how are those decisions made?
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4 Answers
I have always been ambivalent about suggestion boxes. My preferred way to advance new ideas in organizations is for people to actually talk to people and for everyone to be open and listen to new ideas. That may be a bit naive but I still believe it is worth working toward.
Suggestion boxes are anonymous and therefore you tend to get a lot of nonsense in them. Those charged with sorting through the "suggestions" tend to become jaded and may miss some legitimate ideas.
I think the concept of soliciting and receiving the best ideas in any organization is terrific but I would lean more towards an open culture than "boxes".
I like this question and am really interested to see the responses. Companies big and small have made tremendous inroads into leveraging social technologies and unique resource models to foster a "living and breathing" suggestion box. I can't wait to hear about some of the innovative things being done out there...this is a good baseline question for a potential research piece.
What's a suggestion box? ;)
In their heydays, suggestion boxes were placed to provide a chance for employees to offer suggestions anonymously so that they wouldn't get themselves into trouble if their suggestion highlighted something being done incorrectly.
I would hope that those "theory X" days, where the labor force and management were at odds, have gone and that it is possible for employees to offer their suggestions to their management in the open without fear of retribution. I suspect that we haven't reached that point everywhere, but I believe that such an open work environment should certainly be a goal.
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