As Dr. Linus Pauling explained "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas" because sometimes the silliest employee’s idea can make a significant difference to your business and even bad ideas can be a trigger for the perfect one. To have a lot of ideas, your employees need the opportunity to provide input and also receive meaningful feedback from leadership. They need acknowledgment, but first of all they need to be motivated to submit ideas.

Whether you’re watching from the perspective of large company or small enterprise, employees’ ideas can be very powerful driver of improvements and innovation within any company. Most great ideas for enhancing and achieving business growth aren’t discovered in the conference rooms or during brainstorming meetings of managers. They come from employees who are facing and interacting with clients and customers on every day basis and probably have bunch of ideas how to improve processes, customer service, product design or even some operational suggestions. Maximizing employees engagement on idea contribution is the main factor that will drive your business forward.

The great challenge for managers is finding ways to foster motivation or/and innovative ideas of their employees. The most beautiful part of this challenge is that by relying on your employees and their ideas, you’re creating incredible opportunities for organic growth. Studies have shown that companies with engaged employees outperform those without by 202%.  That is why companies need to learn how to listen and encourage their people to use their creative potential in order to tap in the most powerful economic stimulus of all: POWER OF IDEA! This is basically employee-centered approach that is based on encouraging employees to submit all their ideas and engage them in collaboration.

Motivation of your employees is a delicate topic in many disciplines, and here we will focus on how to motivate your employees to submit all their ideas!

Promote innovation culture

It’s very important to raise awareness on innovation and ways on how to submit ideas! Research shows that 42% of employees have no idea where to submit an idea when it comes to them and 80% have never been rewarded for a good idea they put forward. Create innovative atmosphere in your company and be supportive and open for new ideas. Your employees have to know where and how they can become involved in ideation process. Introduce your employees with the system you are using for collecting and developing ideas. Online solutions for innovation management are perfect because your employees can have access to them whenever and wherever they get a brilliant idea! Create short presentations, pamphlets or even posters about your system to introduce it to your employees. This way they will learn about ideation and innovation process very indirectly and they will be more willing to submit their ideas and more engaged in innovation process. Learning and innovation always go hand in hand.

Provide incentives

Setting specific goals is an effective way to get valuable ideas. Create a series of targeted campaigns to get answers on specific questions related to your innovation strategy. Run campaigns cross-functionally and across different departments to get as much ideas as you can, and to hear different perspective on those ideas. Let your employees share insights, comments and openly collaborate on their ideas. Campaigns are used to generate powerful ideas, to move your business forward and to reach sustainable growth through continuosly filled innovation pipeline. This way you will have one place to develop ideas and database for all ideas for further development.

Communicate/collaborate effectively

This part considers your top management. Once when idea is submitted, react! Your employees need to get your feedback on their ideas. Otherwise, they can feel like their input is being submitted to a black hole, and that nobody listens and acknowedge their effort. 86% of corporate executives, employees and educators say that ineffective communication is one of the main reasons for failures in the workplace. Many employees with creative ideas do not share their ideas with management for fear that their input will be ignored or ridiculed. Managers who treat employees with respect will find their employees to be motivated to participate and contribute. When your top management gives them feedback, they will feel more confident into expresing their ideas, suggestions and insights. "An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea."  Edward de Bono

Establish system of reward and recognition

Research show that quality of ideas was substantially increased by introducing rewards. Apparently, the rewards induced individuals to think more about ideas, and  increase employees participating in submitting ideas. Rewards can be a key motivational tool to increase productivity and improve employees’ engagement. They are a powerful mean of promoting participation within your innovation incentives, as they create a sense of contribution to innovation process for idea winners. If an employee’s idea lead to a change, publicize the change. Recognize the employee and show the whole company the benefit of his/her idea. People respect leaders who have the humility to give credit for a job well done. When employees realize that their ideas matter, that will encourage and engage others to become serious about sharing their ideas.

Innovation is a not one-time thing, it’s a process and ongoing approach that will yield lasting results. Leaders and managers have to see it as primarily a communication challenge.  Ask your employees to innovate in areas they well know and are personally passionate about. In text above you have four most important steps that will help you to create systematic collection of all impulses that will lead to innovation. Research shown that the most popular methods to actively manage and drive employee engagement are: drafting employee engagement surveys (55%), creating culture committees and events (29%), and offering employee resource groups (20%). To maximize employees engagement on idea contribution you have to promote innovation culture and support it with incentives, collaboration and recognition of innovation efforts of your employees and you can combine all this together with our innovation management platform.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on 18.05.2016. and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.