New Ideas are Vital to Corporate Growth
Innovation is essential for a company to grow and remain competitive. New ideas, whether they are simple and help save costs, or complex and grow and transform the business must be encouraged and rewarded. Every valid concept that can be implemented to improve an aspect of the company is important to overall success. At InfoCision we have always solicited every employee to tell us about their ideas through our Working Smarter Program, which has a monetary reward. This program has paid off with InfoCision saving hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in direct cost and/or efficiency improvements.
On more than one occasion, our President and CEO Carl Albright has commented about the number of great ideas our staff comes up with, and how the key to implementation is first getting the right people dedicated to following up on priority projects. Our technical teams recently developed a new forum for employees to share their ideas and I am truly excited about the opportunities it will bring to us at InfoCision.
How We Work Smarter
To help turn employee ideas into reality, we have implemented a new program called “The Idea Center.” This is a simple intranet site where employees are able to submit an idea, have it reviewed by the executive steering committee, and then see it through to implementation.
Here’s how it works:
- Each month our IT team holds an “Idea Review” meeting where the executive team will listen to any idea that has been submitted.
- The executive team will provide feedback and direction as to whether or not the idea should become a project.
- The executive team will again review cost, time and other important factors to determine if it would be a wise investment
- The executive team will then assign the idea to the appropriate group for implementation.
What it means to our clients
The overall goal at InfoCision has always been to provide our clients with the highest quality and ROI, which requires us to be innovative, efficient and quick to follow-up on important concepts. One of the three principles our company was founded on is working smarter; this means looking at every idea, big or small, analyzing it and determining how to improve for the better. We take everyone’s ideas into consideration and it really does give us an advantage. If anyone has an idea of how things could be more efficient, it’s those that work in the middle of the situation on a daily basis, so we take their opinions to heart because you never know who is going to come up with the next great idea that impacts the company! How do you feel about the concept of an employee “Idea Center”? Do you have any suggestions or benefits that I didn’t mention? What are some or examples of programs like this that you have seen in the past? Get the conversation started below!