How Employee Suggestion Programs Can Super-Charge Your 2015 Planning

The beginning of Q4 marks 2015 planning time for many businesses. From marketing to sales to finance to product, managers from all departments will come together this month to brainstorm the road map for the coming year.

These strategic planning conversations can have a huge impact on your organization. This is where budgets get decided. Department managers discuss headcount during these meetings. Company executives dive into the data, review the competitive landscape, and devise a plan of attack. Past business performance and metrics help guide these conversations. However, to only have these conversations in a management silo is a lost opportunity to engage employees and get their valuable perspectives.

This is why 2015 planning season is where employee suggestion programs shine.

Where Do Employee Suggestion Programs Fit Into Planning?

It isn't feasible to invite all 700 people at your company to the weekend management planning retreat. However, you can still get employees involved in planning.

1. Use Challenges

Vocoli customers use the Challenges feature to enable managers to post requests for solutions within the platform. 

This works perfectly for idea collection for planning.

Post a challenge and ask employees to give their ideas for solutions. This works great for known problems, like lack of product innovation, or it can also work for open-ended questions like “How can we make our company better in 2015?”

2. Use Planning as an Internal Marketing Theme

To simply buy employee suggestion program software for your company and have it exist somewhere in the cloud is not enough. You have to market your employee suggestion program internally.

You can do this through overview meetings, bulletin boards, internal signage, intranets, wikis, and newsletters.

The channels are endless. What’s important is that you have a clear message for employees and a simple call to action for them to get involved in this initiative.

Here’s an idea: Your message can position the employee suggestion program as a focused ideation period around 2015 planning, leading up to official planning meetings later in the quarter. Your call to action can be for employees to submit ideas now through the end of the month before planning meetings start. The distinctive idea collection period will create a sense of urgency among employees and encourage them to be involved. As a worker, if I know I only have a few weeks to do something, I’m more motivated to login and take action.

3. Leverage Analytics When Discussing Employee Ideas

It’s no use to go through the trouble of promoting this ideation period and collect employee ideas if you don’t carry these learnings into planning meetings. 

However, some ways of presenting ideas are more effective than others, and using data to support a point you’re trying to make is almost always a more impactful method.

Vocoli customers use analytics to communicate employee ideas effectively. With the analytics, you can see trends about what ideas were most popular or least popular, as well as which employees were most involved in the idea submission process. Knowing that an idea got hundreds of comments can indicate employee interest in the topic. These kinds of metrics are a great way to support your presentation of employee ideas during planning.

Key Takeaway: Don't Plan in a Silo

There’s no guarantee that a game-changing idea will come of collecting employee ideas. However, by engaging employees in the planning process and making them feel heard, you can boost employee morale and end 2014 on a high note. In addition, simply getting a broader perspective from your employees can help you feel more prepared to plan for the new year.

Are you using employee suggestions as a part of your 2015 strategic planning? Let us know on Twitter - Tweet us @_Vocoli with your comments.