How Employee Idea Management and Engagement Drive Innovation

You want to give your employees purpose, make them feel a part of the bigger picture for the company. People love to express their creativity—screw the monotonous nine to five. Instead, ensure a work environment that helps creativity flourish. 

“But how?”

Enter stage left: Idea management. Idea management and employee engagement have a direct connection to each other, and that's innovation. When people talk about innovation, thoughts of small teams within a business dedicated to coming up with new ideas arise. However, if you expand this to include all your employees, the results are incredible.

Let's cut to the chase and explore the ins and outs of idea management and employee engagement and how it can change the future of your business.

Defining Idea Management and Its Challenges

Stemming from the innovation management process, idea management is a structured routine for generating, evaluating, and implementing ideas that drive innovation and large-scale organizational change. It creates innovative ideas from your employees and helps turn them into real opportunities.

Idea management can be challenging for some businesses, but innovation specialists have harnessed its power and developed online platforms to make the process smooth and efficient. The two main challenges you might come across are dead ideas and zombie ideas. Dead ideas are ideas that aren't acted on. They just die a lonely death—the poor things. On the other hand, you may have zombie ideas, where the "bad" ideas survive for way too long and drain your resources.

Nevertheless, adopting idea management practices for your employee's ideas, is the golden ticket to your business’s chocolate factory future. And here’s how:

Idea Management, Employee Engagement, and Your Business

Just because you've always done things a certain way doesn't mean it's the only way. For idea management (software) to work, you need people. You engage employees by encouraging them to share innovative ideas. Not only share their ideas but take ownership of their ideas, essentially becoming the CEO of that idea.  This is not a "submit and forget" style of idea management. With this approach, people feel their voices are heard, engagement increases, and the best ideas are at your business' disposal.

It's important to remember that idea management software doesn't build a culture of business innovation on its own, despite popular belief in our digitally charged world. It requires real live people, e.g., your employees. Trust us when we say a chatbot telling your teams how to innovate will negatively affect engagement and productivity.

However, this software digitalizes and formalizes the process with mastery. It organizes all the creatively wonderful ideas from your employees, tests and discusses them at scale, and determines the human, financial, and logistical resources to bring the best ideas to life.

When conjoined and utilized correctly, idea management and employee engagement can have phenomenal effects. It results in success for your business entirely. To break down the specifics, here are detailed examples of these positive results.

1. Happier, more satisfied employees: Highly engaged organizations don’t have to resort to high-stress behaviors to motivate employees. By creating a culture where everyone is working together and given creative freedom, no one feels like they’re just being bossed around all day as if they don’t have much value to the company.
2. Higher productivity: Employees that are engaged are 17% more productive than their peers. They’re more likely to work diligently and with greater effort in the workplace, supercharging productivity and innovation.
3. Improved performance: “Techniques [alone] don’t produce quality products and services, people do. People who care, people who are treated as creatively contributing individuals.” - Tom Peters, In Search of Excellence.
4. Increased retention rates: Giving your employees equal opportunity to utilize their strengths and innovate, makes them highly likely to stay with your company. They won’t have any reason to look for work elsewhere.
5. Better customer service: Engaged employees are more likely to serve your customers better. This is because they genuinely care about their job, and therefore the customers. It’s common business knowledge that happy customers will remain loyal (and spend more money) with an organization that provides excellent customer service.

When you read this list, what's the result that comes to mind? What does this all trickle down to?

Increased bottom line.

If you sustain your business and continuously achieve growth, you’re bound to have a bright future. Competitors will wonder how you always seem to have new ideas and a competitive edge, thinking you have a magic wand in your back pocket. They’ll overlook that they too could use idea management and employee engagement as a powerhouse tool. But you didn’t, and because of that, your business prospers.

Give Your Employees the Power to Innovate

Idea management and employee engagement are driving forces behind a successful business. Adopting the process and inspiring your teams also means adopting a lasting culture of innovation. Implement this system, harness its power, and use it to your advantage—for everyone’s benefit.

“[KICKBOX Intrapreneurship] provides a win-win situation. On the one hand, it allows talented individuals to explore and live out their creativity and innovative spirit. On the other hand, organizations can make use of this energy and the wealth of ideas as a force for innovation, while gaining a competitive edge on the job market.” - Hans Werner, former C.P.O.