Using Ideas from Employees to Improve Your Business

ideas from employees

There can be many useful ideas from employees related to business improvement. Are you an entrepreneur who wants always to find better ways to operate your own business? Are you an entrepreneur who wants always to find possibilities to improve your business?

If your answer is yes, then you are the right person for your small business.

However, when the business starts with the expansion and quick development, you cannot always have all the ideas that your business will need or require in specific levels of their expansion. You need a system that will collect and analyze all ideas that can be implemented with the purpose of your business improvements and future developments. Here will be also ideas from employees.

One of the best sources for ideas is your own employees. They are in continuous touch every day with their working places. So, you will need to use ideas from employees to improve your business.

Listen Carefully In Order to Discover Useful Ideas From Employees

Your sales team is every day in touch with your customers. They know what they want and with what kind of problems your customers are faced. They know exactly what are their needs and what they don’t want in your products and services. They know what will need to be implemented in the sales process to become a more productive process.

Why not use this information to improve your products and services and your overall sales process?

Related: How to Develop and Improve Your B2B Sales Processes

Your employees from production departments know the technology, know where are the biggest “bottlenecks,” where are the biggest costs and what can be improved to make a process much more productive process.

These answers that are known for your employees in the production department can make your business more productive and costs effective. You need to use them if you want to continually improve your production process.

These are only two examples from two different departments – sales and production.

Related: 10 Tips to Create Challenging Demand for Your Products

What about the rest departments? There are plenty of useful ideas that you as an entrepreneur need to unlock from your employees.

But, it is not a simple task…

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post is that you need a system. You need to implement a systematic and strategic approach if you want to implement the process of collection, analyzing, and implementation of different ideas from everywhere in your business.

To build such a system you need to answer the following questions:

  • How can I motivate my employees to become more creative and share their thoughts for improvements?
  • What will be the idea sharing process in my business?
  • Who will be responsible for collecting ideas and initial assessment of them?
  • Who will be responsible to decide what ideas will be implemented in the business operations?
  • What will be the rewards for the employees with the best idea?

As you can see, you must motivate your employees to start sharing their everyday thoughts about possible improvements. Sometimes you can simply ask them, sometimes you can build questionnaires, sometimes you can make periodical contests… This process we can call as the unlocking process for idea sharing.

After that, you will need to develop the process that will contain the flow of the ideas through your business at all levels and responsibilities at different levels.

In the end, there must be some type of rewards that will bring encouragement of the future idea sharing through your company.