27th January 2020
2020: The Year of the Employee Idea: Gethin Nadin – Benefex
This content was taken from our latest eBook: ‘2020: The Year of the Employee Idea: Employee Ideas from our global Engagement 101 Influencers’. To download the eBook in full. simply click here.
Gethin Nadin
Founder
The Employee Engagement Group
In 2011, three researchers (Michael Norton from Harvard, Daniel Mochon from Yale and Dan Ariely from Duke universities) published the results of three studies. They looked at something called “effort justification” – the idea that the more effort someone puts into something, the more they will value it. They found that when people build or create something themselves, they tend to overvalue it. Even when that this is poorly made. They called this ‘The Ikea Effect’. As employees desire more and more purpose from their work, it’s becoming increasingly important for employers to involve employees in the building our businesses. If you want to create exceptional employee experiences that staff value, you must let them drive their creation.
When I worked in financial services, I was responsible for managing my departments employee ideas programme, Ideas In Action. We encouraged employees to submit any idea they had that would improve a process, save money or time or improve the customer experience. To encourage ideas, we would offer a gift for every idea submitted and offer bigger prizes when an idea was implemented. Some of the best ideas we received were incredibly simple. But it was only through asking those responsible for being ‘on the shop floor’ with our customers that they came to light. I remember one of our first ideas submitted saved us around £40,000 a year. Schemes like these have been responsible for ideas like Gmail, Post-It notes and the Sony Playstation.
As more and more organisations realise the cyclical relationship that exists between the customer and employee experiences, the more we are seeing employees be involved in building both. Last year the UK retailer John Lewis re-branded to be ‘John Lewis and Partners’. They did this because “when you’re part of it, you put your heart into it”. The power of employee ideas is so strong that they have transformed businesses for the better.
Tickets are available now for our London Employee Engagement Conference on 1st April 2020 – Click here to register now
Tickets are available now for our New York Employee Engagement Conference on 11th June 2020 – Click here to register now
This content was taken from our latest eBook: ‘2020: The Year of the Employee Idea: Employee Ideas from our global Engagement 101 Influencers’. To download the eBook in full. simply click here.