Employee suggestion system - is it worth it?

Suggestion Systems also known as Kaizen Systems are the most deceptive Lean Management tool.

Seemingly simple. For example, the Suggestion System in three steps:

• Announce that we will now pay for "kaizens."
• Post, a box. Necessarily with a picture of an Edison light bulb. And also a sign: "Workers' Ideas System."
• Go back to the office and wait for the wave of ideas that will change our World.

Oh, and we're still throwing in some low-involvement Lean Specialist to evaluate the ideas at his leisure. A beautiful idea for a... major disaster.

Traps of the Suggestion System

The effects of such systems are easy to predict. Below is a list of the most common symptoms of "fast kaizen disease."

Admittedly, we have included "good uncle advice" here, light-handedly dissected in the What to Do column. Great advice. Taiichi Ohno and James P. Womack[1] would probably not be ashamed of them. However, don't you get the feeling that each of these ideas is "firefighting"? As soon as you get a complicated form under control, it comes out too long to process. Especially during the vacation season. Once you chase down a group of kaizen people to process applications, then suddenly implementation becomes a huge problem. And so on and so forth.

Conclusion one: the suggestion system is definitely not the way to get Lean "off to a good start" in a company.

Is organizational culture a recipe for a good Employee Idea System?

Someone very rightly wrote: "If you want to successfully implement a suggestion system in your company, you need to develop a culture based on trust and shared values." The problem is that if such a culture does not exist, it takes at least several years to create it. Sometimes it even - as John states. P. Kotter[2] in his brilliant publications on transformation - it takes so long to build a new culture until the generation of managers embedded in the old culture retires. Do we want to wait 10 - 20 years for the old managers to leave so that we can abandon our 3 steps of the Suggestion System?

Kaizen ideal

But let's assume that the Lean culture is forging ahead; most of the old managers have already retired, and those who are left have their hearts and minds in the Lean spirit. On top of that, the leaders - the most important piece of this puzzle - are like a picture: 80% of the time at Gemba; they observe, question, inspire, help solve problems. And last but not least, employees - inspired, engaged - spill ideas like from their sleeves. At 10 per month per employee in a company of 500 people. The system processes this like a huge factory - 5,000 ideas per month. 5,000 leaning someone over a sheet, throwing it into a comparison engine, investigating whether there was already something similar, and if there was, whether very similar or less. Should you give a prize or maybe half? Or maybe reject? 5,000 checks of calculations of benefits - financial or non-financial - such as security or customer satisfaction. As if a whole single cycle like that took 5 minutes, you could create an entire back office department for that and set up a flow of one per servant of approving employee ideas. 2.6 FTE. And then there is the substantive evaluation, which puts the burden on the manager or specialist!

Idea vs. problem

Let's look at it logically. Where do ideas come from? From problems. There is a problem - there is an idea. The bright side of the Employee Idea System is that they eliminate problems that are costly to the organization. Ok - so let's create a big form on which the employee first describes the problem and then the solution. He should justify the problem, the solution too. Preferably with an overview drawing and cost of implementation in Excel.

Once an employee - such as Agnes - strains over something like this, a true leader feels the responsibility. The rejection of such a proposal will cause frustration followed, for example, by the release of a rumor that "Adrian got it accepted because his sister works in administration and to a poor person without connections, the wind is always in his eyes." Meanwhile, Agnes' idea only partially solves the problem and Adrian's idea is low cost and eliminates the problem at the source. What do you do leader? Another time explaining all these intricacies to Agnieszka, including Adrian's technical drawing. And you still don't know if Agnieszka will believe and trust. In conclusion, every problem can have several solutions. The system of ideas like: one man - one problem - one solution, often disrupts this principle.

Do even cost-justified kaizens, support what is most important to the company?

It's 2020, and the CEO has announced that we're fighting for quality this year. Meanwhile, 4,500 employee suggestions are about efficiency. We need this efficiency now like a flower for the sheepskin, because sales during the pandemic are not going. "More efficient" processes are standing around waiting for orders. And sales aren't going as well because there were a lot of underperformance and complaints in 2019. And if the quality had moved then maybe customers would have returned and so... we only pay out rewards for ideas.

Conclusion - a kaizen system doesn't have to, but it can ride against the tide of an organization's real needs. If we don't set the scoring to support the company's goals it will definitely go against the tide.

So how do you finally approach Kaizen?

It is best not to create a separate, expensive system.

1. Let's return to our ideal company. The first step - the Board of Directors announces Strategic Goals for 2020. Including the main goal - improving quality.
2. The next step is to cascade these goals so that each Agnes knows how she can best support the company's goals with her work and her ideas. Cascading should be process-based, not vertical. Because, for example, Marek from HR will in no way imagine how he should support product quality. But if we define beforehand how the TWI recruitment and instructional training process affects quality, he can already imagine it.
3. Third, we launch the beating heart of Lean culture - daily employee check-ins. We talk about the problems of the day that prevented the achievement of goals. At the same briefing, employees make suggestions for solutions.
4. In addition, at any time of the day or night, they report problems on cards and, even better, on a phone app, such as Sherlock Waste. Similarly, what has already been reported on a given topic can be seen by everyone and the whole team can click "I have the same thing" and propose solutions. In this way, what is tied to the problem is in one virtual place but available to all.

We get away from checking whether someone has already reported it, because an employee does it. In the case of the Kaizen-Result-Problem board, reporting again means that the solution did not work and the problem came back. After a few such returns, for example, you can refer it to a Problem Solving session. There we will work out solutions as a team and with tools.

An additional benefit of the boards, supplemented by the application, is that we will automatically direct the river of ideas towards the realization of the goals set by the Board of Directors in a given year.

To pay for ideas or not?

This question has been around since Lean took hold in Poland and even before. Few remember that in the justly bygone period there was the Rationalization Ideas System. Legend has it that the more rotund managers could get a good deal on signing off on their subordinates' ideas.

I have mixed feelings about paying for "kaizens." On the one hand, in a meeting with the manager of Toyota's transmission plant in Kisumu, I learned that even there, at our source of wisdom... they pay. On the other hand, discovering and eliminating waste should be an internal need for anyone who agrees with an organization's values. The question is whether it is? A question of whether your organization has such a developed organizational culture? But if it does, how about focusing on attitudes, competencies and goal achievement and building motivation on that?

I leave the question of paying for kaizens, unresolved.

GP

[1] Taichi Ohno - creator of the Toyota Production System, which inspired, among others. Among others. James P. Womack to adopt the system in the West, thanks to which we have Lean management.

[2] John P. Kotter, "How to Transform a Company?"; Harvard Business Schol Press; Helion 2007.

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