By Michael Kanazawa

Suggestions boxes are a joke to most people in organizations. If they are successful, they get overloaded to the point that no staff person can even read through all of the suggestions much less make recommended business changes. But more often, they are a cold, demeaning reminder that low level people have no access to the leaders to provide input or feedback upwards.

In fairness to executives, many of the ideas are so far off the mark in terms of strategic direction or practicality that they are not even worth reading. Bottom line, they don’t create the right kind of dialogue they are intended to produce. There is a method that has been used successfully to generate breakthrough ideas from front-line teams to generate huge savings, jumps in sales, and stand-out customer service. Learn how to adopt this approach for your organization.

Instead of putting up suggestion boxes try engaging employees through their direct managers and teams. People at all levels want to be able to have an honest and open dialogue with their manager about ways to do things better and innovative ideas that come up in the course of doing the work. To keep the ideas relevant, plan for work sessions to gather input.

Start with a clear and simple statement of strategic direction, pose questions and challenges to get people thinking about where new ideas are needed. Then, allow small groups of 4-7 people to work together to brainstorm potential solutions. Work through a hard prioritization based on what the team thinks is practical and how well the priority areas line up to the strategic direction. Before closing, identify any quick starts that are decisions that can be made without any further analysis right at that moment. Put those decisions in motion right away. That will be one of the most motivating things you can do for the team. Then, follow up on the other priorities and keep the team involved in determining how the ideas would be implemented.

These high-engagement working sessions can be low key and happen in the context of normal staff meetings or morning huddle sessions in the field. It doesn’t have to be an over-produced affair or formal approach. Most importantly, it has to be a genuine engagement by the manager to learn, generate new ideas to accelerate success, and result in real changes for the work group.

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