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Creating a digital conduit to connect with employees and encourage them to share and critique business ideas can counter two creativity-killing factors that often plague growing companies, suggests a Stanford business professor.
Two enemies of creativity and productivity—anonymity and bystander apathy—may surface as organizations grow, unless leaders take steps to engage employees, build trust and design systems to foster good ideas and discard bad ones, says Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao in “How to Engage Your Employees’ Digital Imagination” on YouTube.
Rao, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor of organizational behavior and human resources and co-lead faculty for CUES’ Strategic Innovation Institute™, shares these principles and practical ideas:
Provide a forum for employees’ ideas and concerns. At Pulse, a technology start-up that began as a class project at Stanford and was later sold to LinkedIn for $90 million, employees were encouraged to respond to three questions every Friday: What do I like about working at Pulse? What do I wish was here at Pulse? What am I wondering about? These free-form questions helped to reinforce a positive orientation among staff, surfaced ideas for changes to improve productivity, and allowed executives to respond to rumors about the company’s future, Rao notes.
Deploy resources wisely. Rao shares an example from Rite-Solutions, an optical imaging company with clients ranging from the military to casinos, on how to marshal an organization’s collective intelligence to identify promising initiatives. All Rite-Solutions employees have $10,000 in “opinion money” to allot among ideas submitted by colleagues to save money, create or improve products, and develop new product lines. This internal stock market also facilitates collaboration as employees volunteer their time to help pursue other people’s ideas.
