One Small Idea At A Time

from the moving-forward... dept

While everyone is always looking for the "next big thing," companies are often making substantial improvements in how they do business by focusing on the small everyday improvements that come from employees. The article isn't talking about the traditional "employee suggestion box," but a more involved process that has employees feeling more free to suggest changes and brainstorm in the workplace. While most people realize that employee suggestions can be valuable, they don't necessarily build them into the culture of the company. The article notes that for all the talk about coming up with major changes, almost all of the major changes are pretty quickly copied by competitors. Smaller, incremental changes, however are more difficult to keep up with. As an example, they use the story of a furniture seller, who decided to equip all delivery staff with camera phones, to let them photograph any damage (or lack of damage, in case they're accused of damage later). Since then, employees have chipped in with even more useful ways to use those same camera phones, including getting advice from staff back at headquarters about tricky deliveries and for marketing purposes (to remember what someone bought). Meanwhile, we're still being told that camera phones are useless or should be banned? Given a chance to make use of them, employees are finding ways to make them ever more useful.