I Bet Your Employees are Creative
March 12th, 2009 by Lois MelbourneAnother worthy topic that spawned from Gary Hamel’s presentation at HCI Human Capital Summit this week is the creativity of our employees. This blog includes his ideas and topic, but is also woven with my own ideas inspired by him. Hamel challenges us to tap the creativity of our employees. We need to seek their ideas more often.
If you don’t think the average employee is creative, think again. Consider just who in the world is creating all those cool YouTube Broadcast YourselfTM videos, customizing cars, growing the scrapbook industry, blogging, and learning how to cook from one of the fastest-growing segments on TV, cooking shows. Our people are creative.
How are we tapping that creativity to improve our businesses? And if you do tap into their creativity, won’t it lead to further employee engagement?
I have heard some objections to soliciting employee ideas, and often the excuse of “then if we don’t implement their ideas they’ll think we don’t listen.” So the company doesn’t do anything. What if employees were submitting hundreds or thousands of ideas? They wouldn’t expect all of them to be implemented. If you ask for both the wild and pragmatic you will see some things you can use. Toyota received an astounding 540,000 employee suggestions in one year alone!
So now Gary Hamel and I challenge you – tap into the creativity of your employees. It just might be amazing.
Cheers,
Lois
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