Suggestion Schemes - worthwhile or not? 1

[SomptingGuy]

I guess many companies operate suggestion schemes of one type or another, ranging from anonymous drop boxes to intranet-based forums. These schemes offer modest prizes for good suggestions, if implemented. Suggestions in ours are normally one of:

- Trivial administrative suggestion; "Let's buy our paper towels from Towls R Us rather than Joe's Towl Shop. That will save us xxx per year.

- Disaffected person uses the scheme to rant: "I suggest HR get their act together and .... (insert something obvious)". Or more common recently: "I suggest we rehire all the admin staff we fired during the last cost-cut. That way engineers can focus on value-added work rather than delivering post."

Posting engineering-related suggestions isn't really sensible, because we're already paid to do this. And posting suggestions related to other departments is tantamount to criticism.

Does anyone have any good experiences of these schemes?


(I'm starting to feel that the story about the shop floor worker who suggested removing one of the striking strips from matchboxes is an urban legend.)

 

[moltenmetal]

They only work if there's an offer of REAL MONEY. A company I interviewed with had such a system. An electrical engineer suggested they switch to plastic tubing from copper tubing for their instrument air distribution systems on their modules. They calculated it would save them close to $1 million in labour and materials per year, so they gave him a $100,000 cash bonus for the suggestion.

Better still, compensate people in a real and significant proportion based on the financial performance of the company, and ensure all employees are shareholders as well. That's how our place works. Then you can throw away the suggestion box, because people will just spontaneously start doing things the most efficient way they can think of without being asked, and management won't even need to be involved in the decision-making process. It's amazing how cooperative and creative people can be when they benefit directly from their shared success. But it doesn't work if the initial shareholders are greedy- and by definition, that makes such a system virtually impossible for any publicly traded company.

 

[berkshire]

Many years ago I worked for General Dynamics. They had such a suggestion system in place. With the offer that they would give you one percent of any money the company saved if your suggestion worked.
As the frog newly placed in the hot water, I made a bunch of suggestions, got a lot of money and made myself extremely, unpopular, amongst my coworkers who wondered why, they should change since they had done it that way for years.It got to the point where peer pressure stifled the suggestions.
B.E.