Suggestions Scheme/ Discussion Circles/ Ideas Fund & Database

From Wikipedia

A quality circle is a volunteer group composed of workers who meet
together to discuss workplace improvement, and make presentations to
management with their ideas.

A Quality Circle is a small group of employees from the same work
area who voluntarily meet at regular intervals to identify, analyse,
and resolve work related problems. This can not only improve the
performance of any organisation, but also motivate and enrich the work
life of employees.

The use of Quality Circles in many highly innovative companies in
the Scandinavian countries has been proven. The practice of it is
recommended by many economist/business scholars.

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From the Unipart Website

UGC practises continuous improvement
principles which encourage employees to improve quality and reduce cost
through individual efforts or in groups called Our Contribution Counts
Circles.

OCC Circles were first launched in the
Unipart Group of Companies in 1991 and were developed by drawing on the
best practice experience from Japan and North America, but then
designed to specifically reflect the culture of Unipart.

OCC Circles empower employees to solve any challenges that might face them in the workplace. Any UGC
employee can form a Circle with other employees – across all levels and
parts of the Group who are chosen carefully either for their skills or
for the knowledge which they can contribute to the work of the Circle.

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From Personnel Today

They may often seem trivial, irrelevant or downright silly, but
ideas generated by staff can be worth hundreds and thousands of pounds,
a study has suggested.

The research by the journal IRS Employment
Review has concluded that, while some suggestion schemes fail to engage
employees and are eventually closed down, others can lead to higher
sales, more efficient ways of working and lower costs.

Suggestions schemes commonly offer staff cash rewards or other
incentives for coming up with ideas to improve the business or new
products or ways of working.

Almost all the organisations polled – 96 per cent – wanted their
suggestion schemes to bring greater staff involvement, followed by
improvements in how they operated.

And while cash rewards played their part, employers believed workers
placed more value on the recognition they received for their efforts.

Asked to put an annual value of their suggestion schemes to their
company, organisations such as Siemens said £750,000, Pfizer £250,000
and Chessington World of Adventures £50,000.

IRS Employment Review managing editor Mark
Crail said: “You don’t have to be Einstein to have a good idea, but it
takes a good manager to recognise a staff suggestion that can improve a
company’s performance and put it into practice.”

A suggestion scheme box that sat empty and ignored on the canteen
wall was simply an unwanted, token attempt at employee involvement and
so destined to achieve little, he added.

“It requires effort on the part of employers to keep the suggestion
scheme live. The best schemes deal with suggestions quickly and
efficiently, implement those that are worth doing, and make sure the
effect is measured and fed back to managers and employees,” he
concluded.

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Upward problem solving

From The management of voice in non-union organisations: managers’ perspectives

It is evident from Table II that upward problem solving is the
dominant form of employee voice in these non-union organisations and
indeed the most popular form of voice (for managers). In broad terms
this refers to any technique that managers use to tap into individual
employee ideas and opinions, either through two-way communications
channels or through specific systems that are set up for employees to
express their voice. The key features of this category, however, are
that the structures are management-initiated and operate directly
between managers and employees. The most frequently observed form of
upward problem solving was regular and formal two-way communications,
found in all the case studies, followed by project teams. Attitude
surveys, suggestion schemes and electronic means of two-way
communications were also favoured by managers. The number of formal
practices varied, with the average being five practices, which were
found among organisations that tended to be larger and with multi-site
operations, such as Compucom and Scotoil.

All the organisations used two-way communications of one sort or
another, and most of the practices tended to be relatively similar. One
of the more novel forms was the house magazine at Housing Association,
which was compiled by the staff rather than management:

… this is probably the main voice for the staff, but its quite light
hearted and jokey. There are side-swipes at management from time to
time, it’s quite healthy. Occasionally, there are contributions from
management, but the impetus comes from the staff to request things
(manager, Housing Association).

Just over half of the non-union sample used suggestion schemes. A
noteworthy example comes from HiFi Sounds where, in line with the
company’s ethos, the top prize each quarter is a trip for two on the
Orient Express. Other suggestions that are implemented receive up to
£200 depending upon the “bottom line impact”, although management
agreed that this is often hard to quantify. All suggestions are seen
and replied to by the chairman, and it is clear that the scheme was
seen in the wider context of morale building and team spirit. To
facilitate the process of making suggestions, all staff received a
small drinks allowance so that they could go out as a group to discuss
ideas.

The use of attitude surveys is now much more widespread in most organisations, and it is often seen as an example of “good” HRM
in that staff are being asked for their views on a regular basis
(Marchington et al., 2001). Attitude surveys were less common than
suggestions schemes or two-way communications among these non-union
organisations. In the larger organisations, such as Scotoil, employee
attitude surveys were part of a wider organisational (and in the latter
case world-wide) benchmarking exercise. At Scotoil the employee survey
is conducted globally with results fed back to staff and site
management. These are then used to inform staff action points. Three
particular examples of this identified concern with the reward policy,
staff development opportunities and diversity. As a result, each of
these areas were then considered as an agenda item for discussion at
the non-union consultative forum.

A significant majority of respondent organisations also reported the
use of project teams as part of the voice channel. Some of these are
central to the operation of the organisation, such as the matrix teams
at Compucom and Consultancy Co that are formed to deal with specific
projects and are then disbanded once the job is completed. At Compucom,
for example, team members are drawn from different functions within the
company – such as finance, development and IT – and teams have autonomy
in how to organise their work and how often to meet. At Consultancy Co
a development called “strategy days” brings together different project
team members who consider a range of matters, from new prospective
clients to future performance objectives for the company. Separate
teams report back their ideas and objectives to a plenary session that
includes the owner and board of directors.