Part III: Today’s Idea Management and Employee Engagement Systems 
Everyone is familiar with the image of the suggestion box as the front end of a trash can. Suggestion boxes are, by themselves, of little value. Reaping the benefit of “suggestions,” or, more generally, ideas, requires more than simply writing down a suggestion and putting it into a box. Indeed, the old fashioned wooden suggestion box has come to symbolize the failure of idea and suggestion systems in general.
Successful suggestion systems are much more comprehensive and share several common characteristics:
- They are simple to participate in and all employees are actively encouraged to participate
- All ideas, not matter how trivial, are subjected to a structured process of evaluation that provides rapid feedback
- Ideas that are accepted are implemented as rapidly as possible
- Rewards–whether monetary, recognition or merit based–are made commensurate with the value or benefit of the idea
Computers helped us in many ways move beyond the simple wooden suggestion box and slips of paper, serving as collection points with electronic forms and storage devices for ideas with databases. As the Internet took hold, organizations could rapidly and cheaply gather input from more and more people.
Now, taking that process to a whole new level are the Web 2.0 tools, in particular social media tools. They have opened up the suggestion box to internal and/or external stakeholders, enabling robust idea management: the inventing, refining, commenting on and rapid ranking of ideas in an open forum.
Companies can now make use of their organization’s collective intelligence, engage employees and, in Lincoln’s words, bring that collective intelligence “to bear on decisions as they are made,” in other words, in real time.
Idea Management has become the replacement term for the suggestion box and associated suggestion systems. As a buzzword, Idea Management has been defined as the practice of gathering and evaluating ideas in a structured fashion, with a goal of selecting the best ideas with the greatest bottom-line potential for implementation.
Indeed, all suggestion systems that provide benefits of any kind can more broadly be seen as “employee engagement” systems. Such systems foster the ongoing development of employee capabilities, create desire on the part of employees to use those abilities cooperatively for the benefit of the entire enterprise, and then provide the processes, tools and techniques for harnessing and mobilizing increased employee capability and desire.
The wooden suggestion box was simply a primitive tool for gathering ideas. It was merely the tip of an iceberg. From the beginning, truly successful suggestion systems have relied on much more than just the wooden suggestion box: They have been comprehensive employee engagement programs.
Read Part I and Part 2 of the Suggestion Box Series by Sally.
