6 Steps to Start an Employee Suggestion Program: Step 2

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This is the second post in our series on how to establish a successful Employee Suggestion Program (ESP), based on the book Employee Driven Quality.

Our last post covered Step 1, Establishing a Development Team for your ESP.

In this post we will cover Step 2: Defining the Objectives of your Employee Suggestion Program.

You can define the objectives of your ESP in two steps: 1) Define the Purpose, and 2) Define the Guidelines.

Define the Purpose of Your Employee Suggestion Program

After you form a development team for your ESP, the team should meet and agree on its purpose. A mission statement – one or two brief sentences – will help you achieve this.

You can use these clearly-defined to inform the rest of your organization about what you hope to accomplish through the ESP.

Here is an example of a mission statement:

The Employee Suggestion Program at <organization-name> offers a way for our employees to submit their ideas and suggestions for improving our organization, and to participate in implementing those ideas.

After you define a mission statement for your ESP, define its standards of use.

Define ESP Guidelines

The ESP Guidelines for your Employee Suggestion Program will ensure that every user understands how to use it to best achieve their goals. Here are some examples:

1. All employees are eligible to participate in ESP.
2. All ideas are welcome – big or small.
3. There are no bad ideas.
4. We will implement at least 5 ideas every quarter.

Defining the purpose and guidelines for your suggestion program as defined above will help you establish formal objectives.

In the next post of this series, I will cover Step 3: creating a detailed framework for your employee suggestion program . Until then…

Suggested Next Steps:

• Get new information we publish on employee suggestion programs right in your email inbox, sign up for a FREE email newsletter packed with useful info.
• Companies of all sizes (from Fortune-500s to growing startups) use IdeaGlow software to build their own employee suggestion programs. IdeaGlow is affordably priced & relatively easy to implement. If you’re interested, you can apply for a FREE 30-day trial of IdeaGlow software.

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Lauren MacLeod

Hello, I'm your author, Lauren MacLeod. I spend a lot of my time researching the best practices for Employee Suggestion Programs, and writing articles to share them. I hope you find them helpful! I work at Accompa - one of our products is IdeaGlow Employee Suggestion Program Software.

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