Does your company have an employee ideas program? Are you getting any? And more importantly, are you getting ideas that are showing a return on time and investment? Unfortunately, too often organizations start ideas programs with good intentions, only to see participation and idea volumes fall off a cliff. This results in resentment and frustration.

Unless your leadership team is committed to a drastic change in approach, your best bet may be to simply cancel the program as quietly as possible and walk away. By failing to operate the program in good faith, you could be doing more harm than good (essentially saying, “we really don’t want input from our employees”).

Ask any worker what words come to mind when talking about the annual employee engagement survey, and chances are they aren’t positive. More likely they’ll hit you with words such as painful, lip service or resentment.